Using non-parametric weak separability tests that are extended to allow for measurement errors in the data, a broad group of UK monetary assets is found to be weakly separable from consumer goods and leisure over the larger part of the nineties. Financial innovations have made assets with substantial interest rate risk (e.g. unit trusts) more liquid and recent developments in monetary aggregati...

A theory of decision making is proposed that offers an axiomatic basis for the notion of “satisficing” postulated by Herbert Simon. The theory relaxes the standard assumption that the decision maker always fully perceives his preferences among the available alternatives, requiring instead that his ability to perceive any given preference be decreasing with respect to the complexity of the choic...

Motivated by the empirical findings concerning the importance of one’s current situation on her choice behavior, the main objective of this paper is to propose a rational choice theory that allows for the presence of a status quo bias, and that incorporates the standard choice theory as a special case. We follow a revealed preference approach, and obtain two nested models of rational choice tha...

The analysis of lab data entails a joint test of the underlying theory and of subjects’ conjectures regarding the experimental design itself, how subjects frame the experiment. We provide a theoretical framework for analyzing such conjectures. We use experiments of decision making under uncertainty as a case study. Absent restrictions on subjects’ framing of the experiment, we show that any beh...

We characterize the optimal dynamic price policy of a monopolist who faces “viscous” demand for its services. Demand is viscous if it adjusts relatively slowly to price changes. We show that with the optimal policy the monopolist stops short of achieving 100% market penetration, even when all of the consumers have the same long-run willingness to pay for the service. Furthermore, for certain pa...

We study the ordinal content of assuming supermodularity, including conditions under which a binary relation can be represented by a supermodular function. When applied to revealed-preference relations, our results imply that supermodularity is some times not refutable: A consumer’s choices can be rationalized with a supermodular utility function if they can be rationalized with a monotonic uti...

We present a model of reference dependence, which assumes that reference points affect choice by directing the decision maker’s attention towards the particular goods in the reference bundle. This model makes no assumptions about the curvature of utility, and does not assume a built-in asymmetry in gains and losses. Nonetheless it is able to generate loss aversion and can explain a large number...

This paper studies a class of multi-self decision-making models proposed in economics, psychology, and marketing. In this class, choices arise from the set-dependent aggregation of a collection of utility functions, where the aggregation procedure satisfies some simple properties. We propose a method for characterizing the extent of irrationality in a choice behavior, and use this measure to pr...

In the cross-section of households, the portfolio share rises in wealth and has a non-decreasing age profile. The standard life-cycle model with homothetic utility and non-tradable labor income has the counterfactual implication that the portfolio share falls in both wealth and age. We develop a life-cycle model in which households have nonhomothetic utility over two types of consumption goods,...

Does the Internet provide a failsafe against media consolidation in the wake of an easing of media ownership rules? This paper posits a model of news outlet selection on the Internet in which consumers experience cognitive costs that increase with the number of options faced. Consistent with psychological evidence, these costs may be reduced by constraining one’s choice set to “safe bets” famil...