We explore how taste projection—the tendency to overestimate similar others’ tastes are one’s own—affects bidding in auctions. In first-price auctions with private values, projection leads bidders exaggerate the intensity of competition and, consequently, overbid—irrespective whether values independent, affiliated, or (a)symmetric. Moreover, optimal reserve price is lower than rational benchmar...

Elicitation mechanisms typically presume only money enters utility functions. However, nonmonetary objectives are confounders. In particular, psychologists argue people favor bets where ability is involved over equivalent random bets—a preference for control. Our new elicitation method mitigates control and determines that under the widely used matching probabilities method, subjects report bel...

A double hurdle statistical analysis of 250 farms in the Tigray region of Ethiopia reveals different causal factors for soil conservation adoption versus intensity of use. Farmers’ reasons for adopting soil conservation measures vary sharply between stone terraces and soil bunds. Long-term investments in stone terraces were associated with secure land tenure, labour availability, proximity to t...

Children and Parents Time Use: Empirical Evidence on Investment in Human Capital in France, Italy and Germany We analyze a mechanism that has been disregarded in the literature on parental investment in children, as little attention has been devoted to the choices made by children themselves. We model directly time use by youngsters into activities related to the acquisition of human capital, c...

The share of household resources devoted to children is hard to identify, because consumption is measured at the household level, and goods can be shared. Using semiparametric restrictions on individual preferences within a collective model, we identify how total household resources are divided up among household members, by observing how each family member's expenditures on a single private go...

The existing superstar model (Rosen 1981) does not require imperfect substitutes and explains the convexity of total earnings with respect to talent due to higher output for those with the most talent. We develop a model that explains why per unit earnings (wages or prices) would increase at an increasing rate in talent. Imperfect substitution results due to the probabilistic nature of producti...

We study noncooperative household models with two agents and several voluntarily contributed public goods, deriving the counterpart to the Slutsky matrix and demonstrating the nature of the deviation of its properties from those of a true Slutsky matrix in the unitary model. We provide results characterising both cases in which there are and are not jointly contributed public goods. Demand prop...

If preferences or budgets are heterogeneous across people (as they clearly are), then individual costof-living indices are also heterogeneous. Thus, any social cost-of-living index faces an aggregation problem. In this paper, we provide a solution to this problem which we call a ’common-scaling’social cost-of-living index (CS-SCOLI). In addition, we describe nonparametric methods for estimating...

Credit Risk Analysis and Security Design* This Paper considers the potential cost of subjective judgement and discretion in credit decisions. We show that subjectivity and discretion in the evaluation of borrowers create an incentive problem on the part of the lender. The lender’s incentives to accept or reject a borrower depend only on the value of their own claims, not on the total value of t...