This study compares individual preferences across incentives (i.e., hypothetical vs. real incentives) and over time (i.e. elicitation at two different points in time) in a choice experiment involving charitable donating decisions. We provide evidence of hypothetical bias but little evidence of instability of individual giving. There is significant heterogeneity in individual preferences, with r...

The economics of happiness is applied to further the understanding of important consumption decisions in which limited willpower is often argued to lead to suboptimal choices. Based on individuals’ judgments of the quality of their lives, it is, in principle, possible to derive whether some observed behavior is suboptimal and is therefore reducing a person’s welfare. We discuss the key characte...

The Working Papers should not be reported as representing the views of the Banco Central do Brasil. The views expressed in the papers are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the Banco Central do Brasil. This paper characterizes ambiguity averse preferences in the absence of the completeness axiom. We axiomatize multiple selves versions of some of the most important ex...

The Measurement of Child Costs: Evidence from Ireland We apply an extension of the Rothbarth approach to estimate the share of household resources accruing to children (i.e., the cost of children) in Ireland. The method also allows us to identify the economies of scale in the household and indifference scales in Lewbel (2003)’s sense. A practical aspect of the present approach is that it does n...

Game theory traditionally specifies players’ numerical payoff functions. Following the concept of utility invariance in modern social choice theory, this paper explores what is implied by specifying equivalence classes of utility function profiles instead. Within a single game, utility transformations that depend on other players’ strategies preserve players’ preferences over their own strategi...

Integrated assessment models lack a microeconomic foundation in modelling environmental damages to the economy. To overcome this, damage coefficients are incorporated in standard microeconomic models. Firms and consumers take both damages and prices as given. Demand, supply, profit and expenditure functions under damage coefficients are derived that allow easy implementation in applied economic...

In important situations, individual decision-making is systematically biased. When deciding (rather than consuming), extrinsic attributes of choice options are more salient than intrinsic attributes. People overestimate extrinsic attributes and therefore put too much effort into acquiring income and gaining status, lowering their utility level. These mistakes are accentuated in authoritarian sy...

We examine self-control problems — modeled as time-inconsistent, presentbiased preferences—in a model where a person must do an activity exactly once. We emphasize two distinctions: Do activities involve immediate costs or immediate rewards, and are people sophisticated or naive about future self-control problems? Naive people procrastinate immediate-cost activities and preproperate—do too soon...

Consumer risk preferences over income are derived from the optimal consumption bundle purchased at each income, via the construction of an indirect uility function. The paper shows that, even though an individual may exhibit risk averse preferences over a wide income range, consumer theory predicts that the opportunity to acquire high-priced luxury goods can induce a convexity in the indirect u...

We derive a representation theorem for time preferences (on the prize-time space) which identifies a novel notion of relative discounting as the key ingredient. This representation covers a variety of time preference models, including the standard exponential and hyperbolic discounting models and certain nontransitive time preferences, such as the similarity-based and subadditive discounting mo...