T concept of habit or inertia in the context of (reluctance to) change in travel behavior has an important bearing on transport policy (e.g., how to break car use habits) and has remained an unresolved issue in demand modeling. Another major problem in modeling the response to policy measures is the potential correlation or dependence between the choices made by a given individual over time (i....

In this paper we propose benchmark values for the coefficients of relative risk aversion and relative prudence on the basis of a binary choice model where the decision maker chooses between aggregating or disaggragating multiplicative risks. We relate our results to the decison maker’s willingness to trade-off the second with the first and the third (central) moment of his wealth distribution.

The value of time (VOT) is one of the most important values in transportation planning. Although the trip-based models are widely used for estimating the VOT, the trip-based travel model can evaluate the VOT for travelers only. This paper formulates the individual’s choice of whether to travel or not with an activity-based modeling approach. I develop a discrete choice model and a discrete-cont...

What is the fair distribution of gains and losses from risk taking? The answer to this question has wide-ranging implications for economic policy. This paper studies people’s fairness preferences in risky situations. It reports the results from a two stage dictator game where the distribution phase was preceded by a risk-taking phase in which individuals made decisions about whether to take ris...

Flexible Labor Supply Models Discrete-choice models of labor supply have become very popular for ex ante evaluations of policy reforms as they easily account for non-convex budget sets. We test the constraints imposed in practice on these models and suggest a fully flexible model that significantly improves fit. JEL Classification: H31, J22

Theoretical work on stochastic choice mainly focuses on the sources of choice randomness, and less on its economic consequences. We attempt to close this gap by developing a method of extracting information about the monetary costs of noise from structural estimates of preferences and choice randomness. Our method is based on allowing a degree of noise in choices in order to rationalize them by...

While decision making scholarship in management has specifically addressed the objectivist assumptions within the rational choice model, a similar move within business ethics has only begun to occur. Business ethics scholarship remains primarily based on rational choice assumptions. In this article, we examine the managerial decision making literature in order to illustrate equivocality within ...

We propose a theory of choices that are influenced by the psychological state of the agent. The central hypothesis is that the psychological state controls the urgency of the attributes sought by the decision maker in the available alternatives. While state dependent choice is less restricted than rational choice, our model does have empirical content, expressed by simple ‘revealed preference’ ...

Much empirical evidence shows that female and male partners look alike along a variety of attributes. It is however unclear how this positive sorting comes about, because marriage is an equilibrium outcome arising from a process that entails searching, meeting and choosing one another. This study takes advantage of a unique data set to shed light on the forces driving choices at the earliest st...

Some empirically minded philosophers of science argue that the evidence should choose the best theory from among theoretical rivals. However, the evidence may not speak clearly, a problem of ‘underdetermination of theory by data’. We examine this problem in a concrete setting, rival theories of smoking behaviour. We investigate whether several uncontested pieces of empirical evidence allow us t...