In recent years, consumer choice has become an important element of public policy. One reason is that consumers differ in their tastes and needs, which they can express most easily through their own choices. Elements that strengthen consumer choice feature prominently in the design of public...

Much has been said about the stylized fact that the economically successful are not only wealthier but also healthier than the less affluent. There is little doubt about the existence of this socio-economic gradient in health, but there remains a vivid debate about its source. In this paper, we...

An important aspect of household surveys is the design of consumption questions. A controlled experiment shows that a single question on total monthly nondurables expenditure and a design with 35 disaggregated categories produce different results. These differences vary with household...

Early results on the Medicare Part D prescription drug program, from a survey of people age sixty-five and older who were interviewed just before enrollment started and just after it ended, indicate that Medicare has met its target of 90 percent coverage. Enrollment rates in vulnerable...

The responses given in opinion polls on future policy reforms reflect both subjective expectations and preferences. We disentangle these factors using data from a controlled survey experiment conducted in Germany. At the time of the experiment, an increased retirement age had been proposed as...

Experimental studies of search behavior suggest that individuals stop searching earlier than the optimal, risk-neutral stopping rule predicts. Two different classes of decision rules could generate this behavior: rules that are optimal conditional on utility functions departing from risk...

We analyze survey evidence on individuals’ willingness to sanction law violations - such as evading taxes, drunk driving and fare dodging - by disapproval or social exclusion. Our data show that people condition their willingness to sanction a norm violation on their belief about its...

We analyse life-cycle saving decisions when households use simple heuristics, or rules of thumb, rather than solve the underlying intertemporal optimisation problem. We simulate life-cycle saving decisions using three simple rules and compute utility losses relative to the solution of the...

We use laboratory experiments to investigate the effect that assuming rational expectations has on structural inference in a dynamic discrete decision problem. Our design induces preferences up to the subjective rate of time preference, leaving unrestricted both this parameter and subjects’...

In recent years, consumer choice has become an important element of public policy. One reason is that consumers differ in their tastes and needs, which they can express most easily through their own choices. Elements that strengthen consumer choice feature prominently in the design of public...