conjunctive use of ground and surface water can increase reliability of the water supply by providing independent sources. in this study, corrected utility-efficient pro-gramming that allows for more than one seasonal irrigation depth for each crop was used to determine the amount of utility maximizing investment in the well capacity for conjunctive use. results showed that optimum investment a...

Risk aversion plays a central role in economic theory. It helps us understand why individuals insure and save, why investors do not place all their eggs in the basket offering the highest expected payoff, and why entrepreneurs earn a generous premium. But risk aversion alone may not account for people’s willingness to take risk when the chance event is the action of another person rather than n...

The hypothesis of formative causation predicts that as animals of a given species learn a new pattern of behaviour, other similar animals will subsequently tend to learn the same thing more readily all over the world, as a result of a process called morphic resonance. The more that learn it, the easier it should become for others. This possibility was tested with day- old chicks using a simple ...

Research on betrayal aversion shows that individuals' response to risk depends not only on probabilities and payoffs, but also on whether the risk includes a betrayal of trust. While previous studies focus on measuring aggregate levels of betrayal aversion, the connection between an individual's own betrayal aversion and other individually varying factors, including risk preferences, are curren...

Cooperation among individuals depends, in large part, on a sense of fairness. Many cooperating non-human primates (NHPs) show inequity aversion, (i.e., negative responses to unequal outcomes), and these responses toward inequity likely evolved as a means to preserve the advantages of cooperative relationships. However, marmosets (Callithrix spp.) tend to show little or no inequity aversion, des...

Individual-Level Loss Aversion in Riskless and Risky Choices Loss aversion can occur in riskless and risky choices. Yet, there is no evidence whether people who are loss averse in riskless choices are also loss averse in risky choices. We measure individual-level loss aversion in riskless choices in an endowment effect experiment by eliciting both WTA and WTP from each of our 360 subjects (rand...