This paper offers a model of optimism, pessimism, and cognitive dissonance. Beliefs—and consequently choices—depend not only on relevant information, but also on what makes the decision maker better-off. In an associated experiment, subjects who stood to gain from an increase in the price of a financial asset predicted higher prices than subjects who stood to gain from a decrease in price. Cons...

Motivated by real life decision problems, we model a boundedly rational choice procedure, called choice by iterative elimination, where an alternative might not be compared by all available alternatives. Our decision maker continues her limited search until she finds an alternative which is optimal within its consideration set. We study properties of this procure and provide a full characteriza...

We study sequential decision problems where the decision maker does not observe the states of nature, but rather receives a noisy signal, whose distribution depends on the current state and on the action that she plays. We do not assume that the decision maker considers the worst-case scenario, but rather has a response correspondence, which maps distributions over signals to subjective best re...

Contrary to the models of deterministic life cycle saving, we take it for granted that uncertainty of one’s future is the essential problem of saving decisions. However, unlike the stochastic life cycle models, we capture this crucial uncertainty by a non-Bayesian scenario-based satisficing approach. Decision makers first form aspirations for a few relevant scenarios, and then search for saving...

The inability of the Bayesian model to accommodate Ellsberg-type behavior is well-known. This paper focuses on another limitation of the Bayesian model, specific to a dynamic setting, namely the inability to permit a distinction between experiments that are identical and those that are only indistinguishable. It is shown that such a distinction is afforded by recursive multiple-priors utility. ...

This paper axiomatizes an intertemporal version of multiple-priors utility. A central axiom is dynamic consistency, which leads to a recursive structure for utility, to ‘rectangular’ sets of priors and to prior-by-prior Bayesian updating as the updating rule for such sets of priors. It is argued that dynamic consistency is intuitive in a wide range of situations and that the model is consistent...

We examine the predictive validity of two recent innovations to the experimental measurement of time preferences: the Convex Time Budget (CTB) and the Double Multiple Price List (DMPL). Using comparable experimental methods, the CTB and DMPL are implemented, corresponding parameters are estimated, and out-of-sample prediction is conducted for survey measures of patience and incentivized willing...

Recent decision theories represent ambiguity via multiple priors, interpreted as alternative probabilistic models of the relevant uncertainty. This paper provides a robust behavioral foundation for this interpretation. A prior P is “plausible” if preferences over some subset of acts admit an expected utility representation with prior P , but not with any other prior Q 6= P . Under suitable axio...

Global climate change presents a classic problem of decision making under uncertainty with learning. We provide stochastic dominance theorems that provide new insights into when abatement and investment into low carbon technology should increase in risk. We show that R&D into low-carbon technologies and near-term abatement are in some sense opposites in terms of risk. Abatement provides insuran...

Collective decision problems are considered with a finite number of agents who have single-peaked preferences on the real line. A probabilistic decision scheme assigns a probability distribution over the real line to every profile of reported preferences. The main result of the paper is a characterization of the class of unanimous and strategy-proof probabilistic schemes with the aid of fixed p...