The paper analyzes the social discount rate under uncertainty. It employs a preference representation that enriches the characterization of uncertainty by a degree of confidence into probabilistic descriptions of the world. Special cases of the model comprise discounting under smooth ambiguity aversion as well as discounting under a disentanglement of risk aversion and aversion to intertemporal...

The present paper draws on data collected in an investment game plus a questionnaire to investigate whether happiness is affected by circumstances and/or outcomes of the game and to evaluate which motivations or preference structures (self-interested preferences, inequity aversion, altruism, warm glow, social-welfare preferences, trust or reciprocity) may explain such effect. Our result shows t...

Inequality, Inequity Aversion, and the Provision of Public Goods We investigate the effects of inequality in wealth on the incentives to contribute to a public good when agents are inequity averse and may differ in ability. We show that equality may lead to a reduction of public good provision below levels generated by purely selfish agents. But introducing inequality motivates more productive ...

In an environment where the availability of resources sought by a forager varies greatly, individual foraging is likely to be associated with a high risk of failure. Foragers that learn where the best sources of food are located are likely to develop risk aversion, causing them to avoid the patches that are in fact the best; the result is sub-optimal behaviour. Yet, foragers living in a group m...

We analyze the effect of heterogeneity on the widely used analyses of Baily (1978) and Chetty (2006) for optimal social insurance. The basic Baily-Chetty formula is robust to heterogeneity along many dimensions but requires that risk aversion be homogeneous. We extend the Baily-Chetty framework to allow for arbitrary heterogeneity across agents, particularly in risk preferences. We find that he...

Attachment patterns influence actions, thoughts and feeling through a person's "inner working model". Speech charged with attachment-dependent content was proposed to modulate the activation of cognitive-emotional schemata in listeners. We performed a 7 Tesla rest-task-rest functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)-experiment, presenting auditory narratives prototypical of dismissing attachm...

Tax-Benefit Systems in Europe and the US: Between Equity and Efficiency Whether observed differences in redistributive policies across countries are the result of differences in social preferences or efficiency constraints is an important question that paves the debate about the optimality of welfare regimes. To shed new light on this question, we estimate labor supply elasticities on microdata...

On a capital market the social group is formed from traders. Individual behaviour of agents is influenced by the need to associate with other agents and to obtain the approval of other agents in the group. Making decisions an individual equates own needs with those of the other agents from the group. Any two agents from the group may interact. The interaction consists of the exchange of informa...