Behavioral Economics Reading List

Non-standard Time Preference

• O’Donoghue and Rabin “Doing it Now or Later,” AER (1999)
• Fudenberg and Levine “A Dual-Self Model of Impulse Control,” AER (2006)
• Ariely and Wertenbroch “Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Control by Precommitment,” Psychological Science (2002)
• Della Vigna and Malmendier “Paying Not to Go to the Gym”
• Nageeb Ali Learning Self-Control, Quarterly Journal of Economics, May 2011.
• Ozdenoren, Salant, and Silverman “Willpower and the Optimal Control of Visceral Urges”

Reference-Dependent Preferences

• Rabin, “Diminishing Marginal Utility Cannot Explain Risk Aversion.”
• Rabin, “Risk aversion and expected-utility theory: A calibration theorem.”

• Koszegi, Botond and Rabin, Matthew. “A model of reference-dependent preferences,” QJE (2006)
• Kahneman, D., J. L. Knetsch, and R. H. Thaler “Anomalies: The Endowment Effect, Loss Aversion, and Status Quo Bias,” JEP (1991)

Non-Standard Beliefs

• Benabou and Tirole “Self Confidence and Personal Motivation”
• Compte and Postlewaite “Confidence-Enhanced Performance”
• Brunnermeier, M., and J. Parker. “Optimal Expectations,” AER (2005)

Welfare

• Bernheim and Rangel “Beyond Revealed Preference: Choice-Theoretic Foundations for Behavioral Welfare Economics,” QJE (2009)
  
• Gul and Pesendorfer “The Case for Mindless Economics”

Other-Regarding Preferences

• Charness and Rabin “Understanding Social Preferences with Simple Tests”
• Fehr and Schmidt “A Theory of Fairness, Competition, and Cooperation”
• Krawczyk and Le Lec “Social Decisions Under Risk”

• Cox, Friedman, and Sadiraj, “Revealed Altruism”
• Andreoni and Miller, “Giving According to GARP”

Behavioral Game Theory

• Rabin “Incorporating Fairness into Economics and Game Theory”
• Geanakopolos, J., D. Pearce, and  E. Stacchetti, “Psychological Games and Sequential Rationality” Games and Economic Behavior (1989), 1(1): 60-80.
• Camerer, Ho, and Chong, “A Cognitive Hierarchy Theory of One-Shot Games,” QJE (2004)

Evolution of Preferences

• Samuelson and Swinkels “Information, evolution and utility”
  
• Rayo and Becker “Evolutionary Efficiency and Happiness” JPE
• Robson ““Why Would Nature Give Individuals Utility Functions?” Journal of Political Economy, 109 (2001), 900-914
• Robson, Szentes, Iantchev “The Evolutionary Basis of Time Preference: Intergenerational Transfers and Sex”

Memory Constraints

• Wilson, A. “Bounded Memory and Biases in Information Processing,” working paper
• Baliga and Ely “Sunk Cost Bias as a Memory Kludge”
• Mulainathan “A Memory-Based Model of Bounded Rationality”

Behavioral IO

• Heidhues and Koszegi “Competition and Price Variation when Consumers Are Loss Averse,” AER (2008)
• Grubb, Michael “Selling to Overconfident Consumers,” AER forthcoming
• Eliaz and Spiegler “Contracting with Diversely Naive Agents“, Review of Economic Studies, Vol. 73(3), 689-714, July 2006.