One of the most well-established empirical facts is that exposure to advertisements increases a consumers’ tendency to buy the promoted product. The standard interpretation of this empirical regularity is that advertising intensity is an element of the utility. Here we show that if consumers are risk-averse and advertising conveys information about product attributes, the empirical regularity c...

We develop a behavioral axiomatic characterization of Subjective Expected Utility (SEU) under risk aversion. Given is an individual agent’s behavior in the market: assume a finite collection of asset purchases with corresponding prices. We show that such behavior satisfies a “revealed preference axiom” if and only if there exists a SEU model (a subjective probability over states and a concave u...

We develop a behavioral axiomatic characterization of exponentially discounted utility (EDU) over consumption streams. Given is an individual agent’s behavior in the market: assume a finite collection of purchases across periods. We show that such behavior satisfies a “revealed preference axiom” if and only if there exists a EDU model (a discount rate per period and a concave utility function o...

We develop a version of Afriat’s Theorem that is applicable to a variety of choice environments, beyond the setting of classical consumer theory. This allows us to devise tests for rationalizability in the context of choice data on lotteries, contingent consumption, and intertemporal consumption. We also establish a version of Richter’s Theorem that characterizes the strict rationalizability of...

We use a money pump argument to measure deviations from the revealed preference axioms. Using a panel data set of food expenditures, we find a large number of violations of the weak axiom of revealed preference. The money pump costs are small, which indicate that the violations of revealed preference are not severe. While most households’ behavior deviates from rationality, by our measure they ...

This note provides an alternative proof of a known result on the existence of collections of orderings generating intersection quasi-orderings. Instead of proving the result from first principles, it is illustrated how it can be obtained by making use of an analogous relationship between partial orders and linear orders. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Nos.: C60, D11, D71. ∗ I tha...

When making choices, decision makers often either lack information about alternatives or lack the cognitive capacity to analyze every alternative. To capture these situations, we formulate a framework to study behavioral search by utilizing the idea of consideration sets. Consumers engage in a dynamic search process. At each stage, they consider only those options in the current consideration s...

This paper studies how a seller should design its price schedule when consumers’ preferences are subject to temptation. As in Gul and Pesendorfer (2001), consumers exercise costly self-control to some degree and foresee their impulsive behavior and self-control. Since consumers may pay a premium for an option set that is less tempting, the seller may offer multiple small menus. Building on the ...

We show how optimal saving in a two-period model is affected when prudence and risk aversion of the underlying utility function change. Increasing prudence alone will induce higher savings only if, for certain combinations of the interest rate and the pure time discount rate, there is distributional neutrality between the two periods. Otherwise, changes of risk aversion that affect the distribu...

This paper examines the connection between path independence and transitive rationalization of a choice function in a general domain where a choice function may not include all possible non-empty subsets of the universal set. Describing a sequential choice procedure, this paper shows that the requirement of path independence of a choice function is equivalent to Richter's Congruence Axiom and t...