This paper discusses the discounted utility (DU) model: its historical development, underlying assumptions, and "anomalies" - the empirical regularities that are inconsistent with its theoretical predictions. We then summarize the alternate theoretical formulations that have been advanced to address these anomalies. We also review three decades of empirical research on intertemporal choice, and discuss reasons for the spectacular variation in implicit discount rates across studies. Throughout the paper, we stress the importance of distinguishing time preference, per se, from many other considerations that also influence intertemporal choices.

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Time Discounting and Time Preference: A Critical Review

A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/80264/1/571829937.pdf

Defining and classifying ecosystem services for decision making

We develop a theory of prosocial behavior that combines heterogeneity in individual altruism and greed with concerns for social reputation or self-respect. Rewards or punishments (whether material or imagerelated) create doubt about the true motive for which good deeds are performed and this “overjustification effect” can induce a partial or even net crowding out of prosocial behavior by extrinsic incentives. We also identify the settings that are conducive to multiple social norms and more generally those that make individual actions complements or substitutes, which we show depends on whether stigma or honor is (endogenously) the dominant reputational concern. Finally, we analyze the socially optimal level of incentives and how monopolistic or competitive sponsors depart from it. Sponsor competition is shown to potentially reduce social welfare.

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Incentives and Prosocial Behavior

We develop a model that fleshes out, extends, and modifies existing models of reference dependent preferences and loss aversion while accomodating most of the evidence motivating these models. Our approach makes reference-dependent theory more broadly applicable by avoiding some of the ways that prevailing modelsâ€”if applied literally and without ancillary assumptionsâ€”make variously weak and incorrect predictions. Our model combines the reference-dependent gain-loss utility with standard economic â€œconsumption utilityâ€ and clarifies the relationship between the two. Most importantly, we posit that a personâ€™s reference point is her recent expectations about outcomes (rather than the status quo), and assume that behavior accords to a personal equilibrium: The person maximizes utility given her rational expectations about outcomes, where these expectations depend on her own anticipated behavior. We apply our theory to consumer behavior, and emphasize that a consumerâ€™s willingness to pay for a good is endogenously determined by the market distribution of prices and how she expects to respond to these prices. Because a buyerâ€™s willingness to buy depends on whether she anticipates buying the good, for a range of market prices there are multiple personal equilibria. This multiplicity disappears when the consumer is sufficiently uncertain about the price she will face. Because paying more than she anticipated induces a sense of loss in the buyer, the lower the prices at which she expects to buy the lower will be her willingness to pay. In some situations, a known stochastic decrease in prices can even lower the quantity demanded.

A Model of Reference-Dependent Preferences

* Introduction * Economic Rationales for the State * Equity and Efficiency * Public Goods * Externalities * Asymmetric Information * Benefit Analysis * Public Choice * Government Failure * Taxation * Tax Incidence and Efficiency * Intertemporal Issues * Taxes on Labour * Social Insurance and the Welfare State * Income Inequality * Poverty * Social Policy * Pensions and Ageing * Healthcare * Education and Training * Privatisation and Social Ownership * Regulation and Competition Policy * The Environment * Federal Issues and the European Union

The Economics of the Public Sector

Eight alternative methods of eliciting preferences between money and a consumption good are identified: two of these are standard willingness-to-accept and willingness-to-pay measures. These methods differ with respect to the reference point used and the dimension in which responses are expressed. The loss aversion hypothesis of Tversky and Kahneman's theory of reference-dependent preferences predicts systematic differences between the preferences elicited by these methods. These predictions are tested by eliciting individuals' preferences for two private consumption goods; the experimental design is incentive-compatible and controls for income and substitution effects. The theory's predictions are broadly confirmed.

A Test of the Theory of Reference-Dependent Preferences

A theory is proposed in which preferences are conditional on reference points. It is related to Tversky and Kahneman's reference-dependent preference theory, but is simpler and deviates less from conventional consumer theory. Preferences conditional on any given reference point satisfy conventional assumptions. Apart from a continuity condition, the only additional restriction is to rule out cycles of pairwise choice. The theory is consistent with observations of status quo bias and related effects. Reference points are treated as subject to change during the course of trade. The implications of endogeneity of reference points for behaviour in markets are investigated.

On the theory of reference-dependent preferences

The existence of part–whole bias has been hotly disputed in the recent contingent valuation literature. This paper reports on an experiment into part–whole bias. Employing vouchers for parts of a restaurant meal and using an incentive compatible procedure, valuations of the parts and of the whole were elicited. The sum of the valuations of the parts consistently exceeded that of the whole, providing evidence of the existence of part–whole bias in a context where traditional explanations would not have predicted it.

Alistair Munro

Papers

The Economics of the Public Sector

A Test of the Theory of Reference-Dependent Preferences

On the theory of reference-dependent preferences

Does part-whole bias exist? An experimental investigation

Testing competing models of loss aversion: an adversarial collaboration