This paper offers a simple but powerful model of wishful thinking, cognitive dissonance, and related biases. Choices maximize subjective expected utility, but beliefs depend on the decision maker's interests as well as on relevant information. Simplifying assumptions yield a representation in which the payoff in an event affects beliefs as if it were part of the evidence about its likelihood. A...

The Economics of Risky Health Behaviors Risky health behaviors such as smoking, drinking alcohol, drug use, unprotected sex, and poor diets and sedentary lifestyles (leading to obesity) are a major source of preventable deaths. This chapter overviews the theoretical frameworks for, and empirical evidence on, the economics of risky health behaviors. It describes traditional economic approaches e...

This paper provides the first real-world evidence of Giffen behavior, i.e., upward sloping demand. Subsidizing the prices of dietary staples for extremely poor households in two provinces of China, we find strong evidence of Giffen behavior for rice in Hunan, and weaker evidence for wheat in Gansu. The data provide new insight into the consumption behavior of the poor, who act as though maximiz...

Are Risk Aversion and Impatience Related to Cognitive Ability? Is the way that people make risky choices, or tradeoffs over time, related to cognitive ability? This paper investigates whether there is a link between cognitive ability, risk aversion, and impatience, using a representative sample of the population and incentive compatible measures. We conduct choice experiments measuring risk ave...

HeLa cell nuclear proteins that bind to single-stranded d(TTAGGG)n, the human telomeric DNA repeat, were identified and purified by a gel retardation assay. Immunological data and peptide sequencing experiments indicated that the purified proteins were identical or closely related to the heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoproteins (hnRNPs) A1, A2-B1, D, and E and to nucleolin. These proteins bound...

The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model can help to improve our understanding of analysing forecasting hydrometeorological disasters. Especially for some regions like the Nile Delta, which faces growing climate hazards but has inadequate in situ rainfall observations. However, identifying an optimal configuration run WRF is often a challenge. In this study, was used simulate extreme ev...

Institutions and Contract Enforcement We provide evidence on how two important types of institutions – dismissal barriers, and bonus pay – affect contract enforcement behavior in a market with incomplete contracts and repeated interactions. Dismissal barriers are shown to have a strong negative impact on worker performance, and market efficiency, by interfering with firms' use of firing threat ...

Incentives and the Allocation of Effort Over Time: The Joint Role of Affective and Cognitive Decision Making We use natural experiments – plausibly exogenous, anticipated increases in the piece rate – to study how effort responds to incentives. Our first finding, like some previous studies, lends little support to the view that incentives increase effort: raising the piece rate has zero effect ...

This paper is a survey of the literature on theoretical models of the household, paying particular attention to some of the earlier contributions, and using them to place the current state of the theory in perspective. One of its aims is to suggest that the literature’s neglect of Samuelson’s proposal, that households can be modelled as if they maximised a form of social welfare function, was a...

We present a method for evaluating the welfare of a decision maker, based on observed choice data. Unlike the standard economic theory of revealed preference, our method is can be used whether or not the observed choices are rational. Paralleling the standard theory we present a model for choice such that the observations arise "as if" they were the result of a speci…c decision making process. ...