This paper develops new directions on how individuals’ use of multiple goals can be incorporated in econometric models of individual decision-making. We start by outlining key components of multiple, simultaneous goal pursuit and multi-stage choice. Since different goals are often only partially compatible, such a multiple goal-based approach implies balancing goals, leading to a deliberate goa...

Do Downward Private Transfers Enhance Maternal Labor Supply? Evidence from around Europe Drawing on a theoretical model of downward private transfers with endogenous labor supply and recursive econometric models based on 2317 mother-daughter pairs from the 2003 SHARE data on 10 European countries, we investigate the impact of private transfers on the career choices of transfer-receiving young m...

This paper provides the latest research developments in the method of choice experiments applied to valuation of non-market goods. Choice experiments, along with the, by now, well-known contingent valuation method, are very important tools for valuing non-market goods and the results are used in both cost-benefit analyses and litigations related to damage assessments. The paper should provide t...

Gary Becker's (1968) model of rational criminal behavior forms the basis of how economists think about crime. In this paper we report results from economic experiments that provide a direct test of the primary hypothesis of this model: that criminal behavior responds rationally to changes in the possible rewards and in the probability and severity of punishment. We find that the data are genera...

Over the course of the last century, economists and ethologists have built detailed models from first principles of how humans and animals should make decisions. Over the course of the last few decades, psychologists and behavioral economists have gathered a wealth of data at variance with the predictions of these economic models. This has led to the development of highly descriptive models tha...

Dyad-year data on international conflict are simultaneously qualitative and serially dependent. Extending Beck, Katz, and Tucker’s (1998) methodological contribution, I propose transitional models that deal with these two features of the data. These statistical models explicitly deal with the way a dyad’s particular history of peace or conflict structures current outcomes, consistent with impor...

We derive several properties of commonly used discrete choice models that are potentially undesirable if these models are to be used as structural models of demand. Specifically, we show that as the number of goods in the market becomes large in these models, i) no product has a perfect substitute, ii) Bertrand-Nash markups do not converge to zero, iii) the fraction of utility derived from the ...

This paper compares the “out-of-context” predictive success of three probabilistic models of binary discrete choice under risk. One of the models is the conventional homoscedastic latent index or “strong utility” model that is widespread in applied econometrics: This model is “context-free” in the sense that its error part is homoscedastic with respect to decision sets. The other two models are...