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Full-Text Articles in Economic Theory

Are People Probabilistically Challenged? Book Review Of Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast And Slow (2011), Alex Stein Mar 2013

Are People Probabilistically Challenged? Book Review Of Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast And Slow (2011), Alex Stein

Alex Stein

Daniel Kahneman’s recent book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, is a must-read for any scholar and policymaker interested in behavioral economics. Thus far, behavioral economists did predominantly experimental work that uncovered discrete manifestations of people’s bounded rationality: representativeness, availability, anchoring, overoptimism, base-rate neglect, hindsight bias, loss aversion, and other misevaluations of probability and utility. This work has developed no causal explanations for these misevaluations. Kahneman’s book takes the discipline to a different level by developing an integrated theory of bounded rationality’s causes and characteristics. This theory holds that humans use two distinct modes of reasoning, intuitive (System 1) and deliberative (System …


Resource Allocation, Affluence And Deadweight Loss When Relative Consumption Matters, Jesse A. Matheson, B. Curtis Eaton Dec 2012

Resource Allocation, Affluence And Deadweight Loss When Relative Consumption Matters, Jesse A. Matheson, B. Curtis Eaton

Jesse A Matheson

We explore the link between affluence and well-being using a simple general equilibrium model with a pure Veblen good. Individuals derive utility from the pure Veblen good based solely on how much they consume relative to others. In equilibrium, consumption of the pure Veblen good is the same for everyone, so the Veblen good contributes nothing to utility. Hence, resources devoted to the Veblen good provide us with a measure of deadweight loss. We ask: Under what preference conditions does the proportion of productive capacity devoted to the pure Veblen good increase as an economy becomes more affluent? In a …