Nudges at the Dentist We implement a randomized field experiment to study the impact of reminders on dental health prevention. Patients who are due for a check-up receive no reminder, a neutral reminder postcard, or reminders including additional information on the benefits of prevention. Our results document a strong impact of reminders. Within one month after receiving a reminder, the fractio...

When bidders in a corporate takeover have related resources and post-acquisition strategies, their valuations of a target are likely to be interdependent. This paper analyzes a theoretical model and a laboratory experiment of sequential-entry takeover contests in which similar acquirers have correlated private valuations. Increased similarity between bidders has two effects on equilibrium biddi...

Resilience to Economic Shocks and the Long Reach of Childhood Bullying This paper investigates whether people’s ability to withstand and adapt to one of the most important economic shocks – job loss – is determined early on in childhood. Using nationally representative longitudinal data that tracks almost 3,000 children into adulthood, we show that the negative effect of unemployment on mental ...

In this paper, I quantify the impact of state-level macroeconomic conditions during childhood on investment decisions in adulthood. The use of intertemporal withinstate variation allows me to control for potentially confounding unobservable national conditions. Unlike previous research that uses national aggregates, I find a significant effect of childhood macroeconomic conditions on investment...

Article history: Received 23 February 2011 Received in revised form 25 April 2012 Accepted 3 May 2012 Available online 12 May 2012 A behavioral political economy framework is built on the basis of prospect theory to explain the induced and imposed institutional changes during China's market reform, giving special attention to the integrated effects of economic and political institutions. Accord...

In this study I construct a novel explanation for inequality persistence and then present supporting evidence from two separate experiments. Building on Just World Beliefs research (Lerner, 1965), I hypothesize that individuals tend to believe they merit the unequal treatment they experience. Because a component of merit is ability, being disadvantaged (advantaged) by inequality may undermine (...

An economic environment is a feedback system, where the dynamics of aggregate variables depend on individual expectations and vice versa. The type of feedback mechanism is crucial for the aggregate outcome. Experiments with human subjects (Heemeijer, Hommes, Sonnemans, and Tuinstra, 2009) have shown that price converges to the fundamental level in a negative feedback environment but fails to do...

This paper provides a simple autonomy-based model of human motivation in which a decision maker with divided selves must perform some task. The key presumption of the model is that the brain is not a unitary system which is equipped to achieve a single goal in a systematic manner; rather, it is more like an organizationwhich is hampered by several constraints such as preference incongruence and...

The Fe3Ga base alloy is known to exhibit pseudoelasticity and the solute hardened Fe3GaB holds considerable promise as well. The present work aims at developing a theoretical model to establish the critical twinning stress in Fe3Ga with varying boron concentration. The theoretical model is based on the atomisticemicromechanical approach where we utilize density functional theory and Peierls Nab...

Consumers' choices are typically influenced by choice context in ways that standard models cannot explain. We provide a concise explanation of the attraction, compromise and similarity effects. Value is assumed to be determined by simple dominance relations between choice options and sampled comparators, and selection of comparators is assumed to be systematically influenced by the choice optio...