Almost all institutions within modern democracies depend on a mix of communication and competition. However, most formal theory and experimental evidence ignores one of these two features. We present a formal theory of communicative competition in which senders vary in their aversion to lying, and test hypotheses from this theory using a strategic communication experiment. To influence lying av...

In the present study, we tested the hypothesis that an instinctive barrier to nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI)—the aversion to self-cutting stimuli—is diminished in people who engage in NSSI. In a sample of 86 noninjurers and 58 people with a history of self-cutting, we found that NSSI was associated with substantially reduced aversion to self-cutting stimuli across measures of both implicit (d =...

This paper characterizes the conditions for risk aversion in cumulative prospect theory where risk aversion is defined in the strong sense of Rothschild and Stiglitz (1970). Under weaker assumptions than differentiability we show that risk aversion implies convex weighting functions for gains and for losses but not necessarily a concave utility function. Also, we investigate the exact relations...

One of the most robust empirical findings in the behavioral sciences is loss aversion--the finding that losses loom larger than gains. We offer a new psychological explanation of the origins of loss aversion in which loss aversion emerges from differences in the distribution of gains and losses people experience. In 4 experiments, we tested this proposition by manipulating the range of gains an...

We estimate 11 well-studied behavioral phenomena in a group of 190 laboratory subjects (short-term discount rates, small stakes risk aversion, present bias, loss aversion, the endowment effect, aversion to ambiguity and compound lotteries, the common ratio and common consequence effects and sender/receiver behavior in trust games). We study the joint distribution of these behaviors and compare ...

Traditionally, risk aversion (both absolute and relative) has been expressed as a function of wealth alone. The characteristics of risk aversion as wealth changes have been extensively studied. However, prices, as well as wealth, enter the indirect utility function, from which the typical risk aversion measures are calculated. Given that, changes in prices will affect risk aversion, although ex...

We estimate a variety of different economic preferences in the same group of subjects: risk aversion, discounting, ambiguity aversion, compound lottery aversion, the common ratio and common consequence effects, present bias, loss aversion, the endowment effect, the reflection effect, and behavior in trust games. This allows us to estimate the empirical relationships between these behaviors acro...

The relationship between vomiting and conditioned taste aversion was studied in intact cats and squirrel monkeys and in cats and squirrel monkeys in which the area postrema was ablated by thermal cautery. In cats conditioned 7-12 months after ablation of the area postrema, three successive treatments with xylazine failed to produce either vomiting or conditioned taste aversion to a novel fluid....