Gul’s theory of disappointment aversion (DA) has several attractive features, being intuitive, analytically tractable, and parsimonious. In spite of this, the DA model has received little attention in practical applications, which may be partly due to the absence of a procedure to elicit the model. We show how the tradeoff method, developed by Wakker and Deneffe can be used to elicit DA. Our el...

ooking back, the signs were there for several years. Grandma Blanche started misplacing her keys and wallet in her early 50s. Having lived through the Great Depression, my grandma would hide money around the house rather than have it all deposited in a bank. The problem was she would forget where she hid it. I can remember my mother going through every inch of Grandma’s house one day and collec...

This paper examines the degree of monetary policy coordination between major industrialized countries from a completely new perspective. The analysis uses a new data set on central bank issued interest rate targets for 14 OECD countries. The methodology that we use decomposes the notion of coordination into two components: (1) Do countries coordinate the timing of their monetary policy actions?...

This paper examines the influence of educational debt aversion on the career choice of law school students, including the decision to attend law school and the decision to work in public interest law. To isolate the role of debt aversion, I analyze experimental data from NYU Law School’s Innovative Financial Aid Study in which two career-contingent financial aid packages were randomly assigned ...

This paper is the first to apply prospect theory to societal health-related decision making. In particular, we allow for utility curvature, equity weighting, sign-dependence, and loss aversion in choices concerning quality of life of other people. We find substantial inequity aversion, both for gains and losses, which can be attributed to both diminishing marginal utility and differential weigh...

In the Ultimatum Game (UG) one player, named “proposer”, has to decide how to allocate a certain amount of money between herself and a “responder”. If the offer is greater than or equal to the responder’s minimum acceptable offer (MAO), then the money is split as proposed, otherwise, neither the proposer nor the responder get anything. The UG has intrigued generations of behavioral scientists b...