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This article reviews economic studies based on data from high income countries published from 2007 to early 2024 to address three questions: (1) How accurate are subjective beliefs, mainly measured by subjective probabilities, compared to their objective counterparts? Objective evidence comes from another source (e.g., life table, empirical study, expert opinion), or subsequent realizations of beliefs elicited at baseline. (2) How are subjective beliefs determined? (3) Do subjective beliefs affect health behaviors? Several domains are included: survival, and health behaviors—smoking, alcohol consumption and impaired driving, preventive care, diet, and COVID-19 precautions. Results on a single domain, (e.g., survival), do not generalize to, e.g., COVID-19 results. Subjective probabilities embody private information (e.g., self-assessed health, parent longevity). However, individuals seem insufficiently informed about population-level probabilities. There is no systematic overestimation or underestimation of objective probabilities. Several determinants of beliefs are identified (demographic characteristics, education, cognition, current self-assessed health, health histories), but evidence on underlying mechanisms is lacking, how determinants, (e.g., education), affect beliefs. Subjective beliefs, even with substantial noise, often affect health behaviors. Given prior evidence that beliefs are influenced by health shocks, this article reviews research on effects of health shocks on health behaviors. A major health shock to an individual—a new diagnosis (e.g., diabetes) or a serious adverse health event (e.g., heart attack), by changing subjective probabilities leads to some healthier behaviors, however, sometimes only temporarily. Behaviors may also be influenced by utility loss following a health shock, e.g., learning about pecuniary and non-pecuniary costs of hospitalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how objective and subjective heterogeneity in life expectancy affects savings behavior of healthy and unhealthy people. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, we first document systematic biases in survival beliefs across self‐reported health: those in poor health not only have a shorter actual lifespan but also underestimate their remaining life time. To gauge the effect on savings behavior and wealth accumulation, we use an overlapping‐generations model where survival probabilities and beliefs evolve according to a health and survival process estimated from data. We conclude that differences in life expectancy are important to understand savings behavior, and that the belief biases, especially among the unhealthy, can explain up to a fifth of the observed health‐wealth gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The consequences of most economic decisions are uncertain; they are conditional on events with unknown probabilities that decision makers evaluate based on their beliefs. In addition to consequences and beliefs, the context that generates events—the source of uncertainty—can also impact preferences, a pattern called source dependence. Despite its importance, there is currently no definition of source dependence that allows for comparisons across individuals and sources. This paper presents a tractable definition of source dependence by introducing a function that matches the subjective probabilities of events generated by two sources. It also presents methods for estimating such functions from a limited number of observations that are compatible with commonly-used choice-based approaches for separating attitudes from beliefs. As an illustration, we implement these methods on three datasets, including two original experiments, and show that they consistently capture clear, albeit heterogeneous, patterns of source dependence between natural sources. Our approach provides a framework for future research to explore how source dependence varies across individuals and situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Life span uncertainty (longevity risk) impacts several economic decisions. Individuals can form and revise their survival beliefs making use of behavioral heuristics. We propose a model of sentiment, in which individuals are assumed to switch between optimistic and pessimistic expectations of their health. When optimism is persistent in the face of health shocks, or when individuals are more likely to change their sentiment from pessimistic to optimistic than otherwise, our model predicts survival underestimation at young ages and overestimation at old ages. An empirical analysis based on the longitudinal data from Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe validates our model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there has been debate about the effectiveness of treatments from different fields, such as neurostimulation, neurofeedback, brain training, and pharmacotherapy. This debate has been fuelled by contradictory and nuanced experimental findings. Notably, the effectiveness of a given treatment is commonly evaluated by comparing the effect of the active treatment versus the placebo on human health and/or behaviour. However, this approach neglects the individual’s subjective experience of the type of treatment she or he received in establishing treatment efficacy. Here, we show that individual differences in subjective treatment - the thought of receiving the active or placebo condition during an experiment - can explain variability in outcomes better than the actual treatment. We analysed four independent datasets (N = 387 participants), including clinical patients and healthy adults from different age groups who were exposed to different neurostimulation treatments (transcranial magnetic stimulation: Studies 1 and 2; transcranial direct current stimulation: Studies 3 and 4). Our findings show that the inclusion of subjective treatment can provide a better model fit either alone or in interaction with objective treatment (defined as the condition to which participants are assigned in the experiment). These results demonstrate the significant contribution of subjective experience in explaining the variability of clinical, cognitive, and behavioural outcomes. We advocate for existing and future studies in clinical and non-clinical research to start accounting for participants’ subjective beliefs and their interplay with objective treatment when assessing the efficacy of treatments. This approach will be crucial in providing a more accurate estimation of the treatment effect and its source, allowing the development of effective and reproducible interventions.

Aging in the face of an increasing population and growing life expectancy is considered one of the major demographic challenges in modern society. Previous research has revealed that quality of life in aging could significantly differ depending on the resources one possesses. However, little attention has been given to the mechanisms of formation of these resources and the role of intentionality. In the present study, we identified 22 strategies that favor a better life quality in aging and analyzed them from the perspective of subjective beliefs and reported performance. Our sample was adults (n = 72) aged 57–65, living in St. Petersburg, Russia. The results showed that although participants were aware of the strategies that favor aging, their reported performance ranged on a scale from average to infrequent use of these strategies. We found that subjective beliefs about the role of psychological resources for better aging predicted higher scores on subjective beliefs about the role of lifestyle resources and the reported performance of psychological resources. Our results suggest that there is a gap between subjective beliefs about the controllability of aging processes and the transformation of these beliefs into real performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic presents a remarkable opportunity to put to work all of the research that has been undertaken in past decades on the elicitation and structural estimation of subjective belief distributions as well as preferences over atemporal risk, patience, and intertemporal risk. As contributors to elements of that research in laboratories and the field, we drew together those methods and applied them to an online, incentivized experiment in the United States. We have two major findings. First, the atemporal risk premium during the COVID-19 pandemic appeared to change significantly compared to before the pandemic, consistent with theoretical results of the effect of increased background risk on foreground risk attitudes. Second, subjective beliefs about the cumulative level of deaths evolved dramatically over the period between May and November 2020, a volatile one in terms of the background evolution of the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People’s beliefs about everyday events are both of theoreti-cal interest in their own right and an important ingredient inmodel building—especially in Bayesian cognitive models ofphenomena such as logical reasoning, future predictions, andlanguage use. Here, we explore several recently used methodsfor measuring subjective beliefs about unidimensional contigu-ous properties, such as the likely price of a new watch. Asa first step towards a way of assessing and comparing beliefelicitation methods, we use hierarchical Bayesian modeling forinferring likely population-level beliefs as the central tendencyof participants’ individual-level beliefs. Three different depen-dent measures are considered: (i) slider ratings of (relative)likelihood of intervals of values, (ii) a give-a-number task, and(iii) choice of the more likely of two intervals of values. Ourresults suggest that using averaged normalized slider ratingsfor binned quantities is a practical and fairly good approxima-tor of inferred population-level beliefs.

• Accurate elicitation of beliefs requires incentivization for truthful reports. • Beliefs about COVID-19 interact with risk management efforts. • We elicit beliefs about COVID-19 prevalence and mortality over a 6-month period. • Beliefs on The Street differ markedly from epidemiological models of the virus. Subjective belief elicitation about uncertain events has a long lineage in the economics and statistics literatures. Recent developments in the experimental elicitation and statistical estimation of subjective belief distributions allow inferences about whether these beliefs are biased relative to expert opinion, and the confidence with which they are held. Beliefs about COVID-19 prevalence and mortality interact with risk management efforts, so it is important to understand relationships between these beliefs and publicly disseminated statistics, particularly those based on evolving epidemiological models. The pandemic provides a unique setting over which to bracket the range of possible COVID-19 prevalence and mortality outcomes given the proliferation of estimates from epidemiological models. We rely on the epidemiological model produced by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation together with the set of epidemiological models summarised by FiveThirtyEight to bound prevalence and mortality outcomes for one-month, and December 1, 2020 time horizons. We develop a new method to partition these bounds into intervals, and ask subjects to place bets on these intervals, thereby revealing their beliefs. The intervals are constructed such that if beliefs are consistent with epidemiological models, subjects are best off betting the same amount on every interval. We use an incentivised experiment to elicit beliefs about COVID-19 prevalence and mortality from 598 students at Georgia State University, using six temporally-spaced waves between May and November 2020. We find that beliefs differ markedly from epidemiological models, which has implications for public health communication about the risks posed by the virus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aging in the face of an increasing population and growing life expectancy is considered one of the major demographic challenges in modern society. Previous research has revealed that quality of life in aging could significantly differ depending on the resources one possesses. However, little attention has been given to the mechanisms of formation of these resources and the role of intentionality. In the present study, we identified 22 strategies that favor a better life quality in aging and analyzed them from the perspective of subjective beliefs and reported performance. Our sample was adults (n = 72) aged 57–65, living in St. Petersburg, Russia. The results showed that although participants were aware of the strategies that favor aging, their reported performance ranged on a scale from average to infrequent use of these strategies. We found that subjective beliefs about the role of psychological resources for better aging predicted higher scores on subjective beliefs about the role of lifestyle resources and the reported performance of psychological resources. Our results suggest that there is a gap between subjective beliefs about the controllability of aging processes and the transformation of these beliefs into real performance.

Neoclassical economic theory assumes that whenever agents tackle dynamic decisions under ambiguity, preferences are represented by the Subjective Expected Utility (SEU) model and prior beliefs are updated according to Bayes rule, upon the arrival of partial information. Nevertheless, when one considers non-neutral ambiguity attitudes, either the axiom of dynamic consistency or of consequentialism should be relaxed. Using data from an economic experiment on dynamic choice under ambiguity, we study which of the two rationality axioms people violate, along with the question of whether this violation is part of a conscious planning strategy or not. The combination of the two, allows us to classify non-SEU subjects to three behavioural types: resolute, naïve and sophisticated. The hypothesis of Bayesian updating is rejected for more than half of the experimental population. For ambiguity non-neutral subjects, we find that the majority are sophisticated, a few are naïve and very few are resolute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The farmer-pastoralist conflict (FPC) in Nigeria has aggravated in recent years. It generated intense debate between 2015 and 2018 because of the aggravation of the conflict and the increased fatalities associated with it. This paper analyses the media representation of the conflict. Data were newspapers' editorials and regular columnists' stories and supplemented by government and independent bodies' reports. Newspapers, as agents of popular culture, play a critical role in the propagation of various discourses of the conflict which seek interpellation and are also contested. This paper shows that the discourse is dichotomous and conflictive between ecological reasoning and ethnic-regional and religious imaginations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyzes the discount rate under uncertainty. The analysis complements the probabilistic characterization of uncertainty by a measure of confidence. Special cases of the model comprise discounting under smooth ambiguity aversion as well as discounting under a disentanglement of risk aversion from aversion to intertemporal substitution. The paper characterizes the general class of preferences for which uncertainty implies a reduction of the discount rate. It also characterizes how the more comprehensive description of uncertainty changes the discount rate with respect to the standard model. The paper relates different results in the literature by switching between different risk measures. It presents a parametric extension of the Ramsey discounting formula that takes into account confidence into future growth estimates and a measure of aversion to the lack of confidence. If confidence decreases in the futurity of the growth forecast, the discount rates have a falling term structure even in the case of an iid growth process.

The paper incorporates qualitative differences of probabilistic beliefs into a rational (or normatively motivated) decision framework. Probabilistic beliefs can range from objective probabilities to pure guesstimates. The decision maker in the present model takes into account his confidence in beliefs when evaluating general uncertain situations. From an axiomatic point of view, the approach stays as close as possible to the widespread von Neumann-Morgenstern framework. The resulting representation uses only basic tools from risk analysis, but employs them recursively. The paper extends the concept of smooth ambiguity aversion to a more general notion of aversion to the subjectivity of belief. As a special case, the framework permits a threefold disentanglement of intertemporal substitutability, Arrow-Pratt risk aversion, and smooth ambiguity aversion. A decision maker’s preferences can nest a variety of widespread decision criteria, which are selected according to his confidence in the uncertainty assessment of a particular setting.

Choice experiments are a popular method of generating stated preference data for a variety of fields from marketing to health, transportation and environmental economics. They allow researchers to systematically vary choice attributes in a manner that can both increase estimation efficiency and allay endogeneity concerns. An increasing number of studies have included elicited subjective beliefs in their stated preference models. We discuss why this strategy may be warranted in some cases, specifically when the researcher suspects subjects will engage in attribute value substitution or scenario adjustment. While there are multiple ways one could integrate subjective beliefs, in all cases a proper understanding of the econometric ramifications of their inclusion is necessary. We show that excluding subjective beliefs yields biased parameter estimates yet policy-relevant welfare measures, whereas including subjective beliefs yields unbiased parameter estimates but can generate less policy-relevant welfare estimates. We demonstrate how policy-relevant welfare measures should be calculated from models that include subjective beliefs and illustrate our theory with an application to payment for ecosystem services to farmers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We provide a comprehensive empirical analysis on the role of beliefs about the probability of completing post-secondary education, elicited before the end of secondary school, for students' future education choices. Although there is substantial evidence on the relevance of subjective beliefs for returns to post-secondary education conditional on completion, there is little evidence linking early beliefs to the extensive margin of completing a degree. We exploit (i) a representative population sample which (ii) follows students over a long time horizon, two key features largely absent from the previous literature on subjective beliefs. We find that completion beliefs are mainly related to cognitive and non-cognitive skills, as opposed to family background or opportunities in the local labor market. Completion beliefs elicited before the end of secondary school are highly predictive for later key education outcomes, with a predictive accuracy comparable to an econometric model with perfect foresight. Assessing the heterogeneity of the relationship, our results imply that beliefs are most important for lower ability students and in times of tougher local labor markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People vary in their beliefs about their tendency to engage in perspective taking and to understand other’s feelings. Often, however, those beliefs are suggested to be poor indicators of actual skills and thus provide an inaccurate reflection of performance. Few studies, however, have examined whether people’s beliefs accurately predict their performance on emotion recognition tasks using dynamic or spontaneous emotional expressions. We report six studies (N ranges from 186 to 315; Ntotal = 1,347) testing whether individuals’ report of their engagement in perspective taking, as measured by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI; Davis, 1983), is associated with accurate emotion recognition. In Studies 1–3, emotion recognition performance was assessed using three standard tests of nonverbal emotion recognition. To provide a more naturalistic test, we then assessed performance with a new emotion recognition test in Studies 4–6, using videos of real targets that share their emotional experiences. Participants’ multi-scalar ratings of the targets’ emotions were compared with the targets’ own emotion ratings. Across all studies, we found a modest, yet significant positive relationship: people who believe that they take the other’s perspective also perform better in tests of emotion recognition (r = 0.20, p < 0.001). Beliefs about taking others’ perspective thus reflect interpersonal reality, but only partially.

In recent years, there has been debate about the effectiveness of treatments from different fields, such as neurostimulation, neurofeedback, brain training, and pharmacotherapy. This debate has been fuelled by contradictory and nuanced experimental findings. Notably, the effectiveness of a given treatment is commonly evaluated by comparing the effect of the active treatment versus the placebo on human health and/or behaviour. However, this approach neglects the individual's subjective experience of the type of treatment she or he received in establishing treatment efficacy. Here, we show that individual differences in subjective treatment - the thought of receiving the active or placebo condition during an experiment - can explain variability in outcomes better than the actual treatment. We analysed four independent datasets (N = 387 participants), including clinical patients and healthy adults from different age groups who were exposed to different neurostimulation treatments (transcranial magnetic stimulation: Studies 1 and 2; transcranial direct current stimulation: Studies 3 and 4). Our findings show that the inclusion of subjective treatment can provide a better model fit either alone or in interaction with objective treatment (defined as the condition to which participants are assigned in the experiment). These results demonstrate the significant contribution of subjective experience in explaining the variability of clinical, cognitive, and behavioural outcomes. We advocate for existing and future studies in clinical and non-clinical research to start accounting for participants' subjective beliefs and their interplay with objective treatment when assessing the efficacy of treatments. This approach will be crucial in providing a more accurate estimation of the treatment effect and its source, allowing the development of effective and reproducible interventions., Competing Interests: LF, SH, ZD, DB, RC No competing interests declared, (© 2023, Fassi, Hochman et al.)

Farmers in the developed world tend to over-apply fertilizer, and we explore a model for decision-making under uncertainty in yields. This article proposes an agro-economic model for farmer decision-making based on subjective expected yield and crop response to fertilization. The model explores subjective yield probability distributions that are both better suited to subjective crop yields than the previously proposed probability distribution and is easier to extract from farmers. The model allows the analysis of the impact of changes in fertilizer price and variance of expected yields. The model result is consistent with observed farmer behavior based on the rule of “fertilizing for the good years” that appears, according to our model, as rational and consistent with expected profit maximization under yield uncertainty since the cost of over-application is lower than that of the opportunity cost of under-application. The goal of increasing the efficiency of nitrogen use requires both technical innovation and an expansion of the knowledge on the socioeconomic factors underlying excessive crop fertilization that must be improved both to meet future food demands and to prevent environmental degradation and climate change.

The use of crypto-currencies in financial applications is receiving increasing interest. This paper relies on a Bayesian framework that combines market-neutral information with subjective beliefs to show an application of how Bitcoin can be exploited to build diversified investment strategies. By means of an intuitive procedure based on the Black and Litterman model, I propose to relate portfolio construction with the role of news in generating investors' subjective beliefs, which are computed according to market reactions occurred after similar announcement events in the recent past. To test this approach, the analysis refers to an extremely volatile market phase for Bitcoin such as the interval from mid-2017 to mid-2018. Results indicate that Bitcoin can contribute to improve the risk-adjusted performances of diversified portfolios and that investors' subjective beliefs can help to interpret the fundamental drivers of crypto-currencies' market behaviors. This approach may also stimulate the investigation of more sophisticated strategies built according to the relationships between news and investors' personal views on Bitcoin market dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People vary in their beliefs about their tendency to engage in perspective taking and to understand other's feelings. Often, however, those beliefs are suggested to be poor indicators of actual skills and thus provide an inaccurate reflection of performance. Few studies, however, have examined whether people's beliefs accurately predict their performance on emotion recognition tasks using dynamic or spontaneous emotional expressions. We report six studies (N ranges from 186 to 315; N total = 1,347) testing whether individuals' report of their engagement in perspective taking, as measured by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI; Davis, 1983), is associated with accurate emotion recognition. In Studies 1–3, emotion recognition performance was assessed using three standard tests of nonverbal emotion recognition. To provide a more naturalistic test, we then assessed performance with a new emotion recognition test in Studies 4–6, using videos of real targets that share their emotional experiences. Participants' multi-scalar ratings of the targets' emotions were compared with the targets' own emotion ratings. Across all studies, we found a modest, yet significant positive relationship: people who believe that they take the other's perspective also perform better in tests of emotion recognition (r = 0.20, p < 0.001). Beliefs about taking others' perspective thus reflect interpersonal reality, but only partially. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Behavioral economics poses a challenge for the welfare evaluation of insurance products and policy. It demands that we recognize that the descriptive account of behavior toward insurance depends on risk and time preferences that might not be the ones we were all taught, and still teach, and that subjective beliefs might not accord with actuarial assessments of loss probabilities. Challenging as that can be, things become even harder when we jettison naive notions of revealed preferences as the basis for evaluating the individual welfare of insurance decisions. These challenges demand theory, datasets that allow us to identify structural models, datasets that allow us to observe those that do not purchase insurance, appropriate econometric methods, and particularly pay close attention to the methodological nonsense that is often used to justify policy interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop a theoretical model of optimal hedging that nests expected utility and expected target utility theories. We use this model to characterize optimal hedging with and without reference price dependence. The model's theoretical predictions are tested with a unique database consisting of every forward contract written with a major grain marketing firm by Iowa corn producers over a five-year period. Our results suggest that a current December futures price higher than a reference price triggers hedging activity. A likely candidate for producers' reference price is a rolling average of the current futures price. We then use trading activity implied by the producers to determine if they benefit from the way they hedge. The evidence is mixed. Finally, we compare the producer forward contract data to the only publicly available data on producer hedging: The Commodity Futures Trading Commission Disaggregated Commitment of Traders Report (DCOT) for Short Hedgers. A hedge ratio constructed from the open interest in new futures contracts of the DCOT report is highly correlated with the producer hedge series in the Iowa data, providing evidence that DCOT data represent farmers' hedging behavior reasonably well. This work has important implications for future research that uses the DCOT data, and provides new evidence about producers' hedging behavior that marketing specialists and extension agents can use to enhance their educational efforts related to risk management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different models of uncertainty aversion imply strikingly different economic behavior. The key to understanding these differences lies in the dichotomy between first-order and second-order ambiguity aversion, which I define here. My definition and its characterization are independent of specific representations of decisions under uncertainty. I show that with second-order ambiguity aversion, a positive exposure to ambiguity is optimal if and only if there is a subjective belief such that the act's expected outcome is positive. With first-order ambiguity aversion, zero exposure to ambiguity can be optimal. Examples in finance, insurance, and contracting demonstrate the economic relevance of this dichotomy. This paper was accepted by Han Bleichrodt, decision analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subjective beliefs are elicited routinely in economics experiments. However, such elicitation often suffers from two possible disadvantages. First, beliefs are recovered in the form of a summary statistic, usually the mean, of the underlying latent distribution. Second, recovered beliefs are biased significantly due to risk aversion. We characterize an approach for eliciting the entire subjective belief distribution that is minimally biased due to risk aversion. We offer simulated examples to demonstrate the intuition of our approach. We also provide theory to formally characterize our framework. And we provide experimental evidence which corroborates our theoretical results. We conclude that for empirically plausible levels of risk aversion, one can reliably elicit most important features of the latent subjective belief distribution without undertaking calibration for risk attitudes providing one is willing to assume Subjective Expected Utility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study utilizes food values in conjunction with willingness to pay (WTP) measures to identify consumers’ subjective beliefs about functional foods. We conducted a non-hypothetical, second price experimental auction (i.e., a Vickrey auction) to estimate WTP for a new functional snack made with white lupine and citrus fiber. A sample of 156 consumers was surveyed in Catania, Sicily (Italy) in July 2015. The findings of the economic experiment reveal a WTP premium for the new functional snack, a premium which depends on functional components but also on other characteristics that go beyond intrinsic healthy properties. Consumers’ WTP for functional foods significantly varies with food values related to origin, safety, naturalness, price, etc., which implies consumers have different subjective beliefs about functional and non-functional foods. These findings have implications for the food sector attempting to design and promote consumption of functional foods, and suggest health is not the only factor motivating functional food purchases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use data on consumers’ subjective beliefs about the distribution of prices in an online marketplace to investigate two questions of interest. First, when consumers face price uncertainty, to what extent do their beliefs about the distribution of prices reflect the actual empirical price distribution? Second, do consumers learn about features of the empirical distribution through experience? Using reported expectations for online textbook prices from a survey of 1224 college students, we find that consumers with no prior experience in purchasing textbooks online tend to expect online prices to be higher than what is observed empirically. However, consumers with more experience in the marketplace generally have more accurate beliefs about the price distribution, which is consistent with learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examined the correlations between willingness to pay (WTP) for functional foods and subjective beliefs associated with food values. We conducted a non-hypothetical economic experiment through a second price sealed bid experimental auction (Vickrey auction) to estimate the willingness to pay for buying a new functional snack made with white lupine and citrus fiber, which are ingredients with high fiber content. A sample of 156 consumers was surveyed in Catania, Sicily (Italy) in July 2015. Beyond the intrinsic healthy properties of functional foods, the findings of this paper showed that the premium price in favor of functional foods also depends on subjective beliefs related to certain food values like origin, safety, naturalness, price etc. These findings could have important implications for the industry of food sector that should design appropriate initiatives to promote the consumption of functional foods combining both healthiness and other food values. Despite the findings of this study should be interpreted with a certain caution, this paper represents a further step in the research area aimed at identifying factors affecting consumption of functional foods by proposing a new methodological approach not yet used in the previous studies on consumption of functional foods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper used seven waves of data from the US Health and Retirement Study to investigate the impact of expectations regarding the timing of retirement on pre-retirement wealth accumulation of married households. More specifically, the effect of married individuals' subjective beliefs of working full time after age 62 on household wealth was analyzed. Individuals' perceptions of the usual retirement age on the job was used as an instrument for their subjective beliefs of working full time after age 62. On a whole, the point estimates suggested that the responsiveness of married mens' saving behavior to retirement dates expectations was larger than that of married women. In particular, wealth of married households where men had the bargaining power in terms of being sole earners, exhibited the largest decrease in response to increases in subjective probabilities of working past age 62. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Incentivized methods for eliciting subjective probabilities in economic experiments present the subject with risky choices that encourage truthful reporting. We discuss the most prominent elicitation methods and their underlying assumptions, provide theoretical comparisons and give a new justification for the quadratic scoring rule. On the empirical side, we survey the performance of these elicitation methods in actual experiments, considering also practical issues of implementation such as order effects, hedging, and different ways of presenting probabilities and payment schemes to experimental subjects. We end with a discussion of the trade-offs involved in using incentives for belief elicitation and some guidelines for implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large literature suggests that many individuals do not apply Bayes' Rule when making decisions that depend on them correctly pooling prior information and sample data. We replicate and extend a classic experimental study of Bayesian updating from psychology, employing the methods of experimental economics, with careful controls for the confounding effects of risk aversion. Our results show that risk aversion significantly alters inferences on deviations from Bayes' Rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] The study uses methods from experimental economics to study driver behavior and safety. [•] The study demonstrates joint estimation of risk attitudes and subjective beliefs of drivers. [•] Subjective beliefs change with experience in the task and the driver's skill. [•] Drivers who crash had higher perceived probabilities to successfully complete the driving task. [•] There was no difference in drivers’ risk attitudes among drivers who did and did not crash. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]