Economics uses different behavioural models for risk, time, losses, valuation, and social choice. I study a unified choice experiment in which the same decision makers face all these domains. I hide a decision maker's choices in one domain and ask a frozen tabular foundation model to recover them from that decision maker's choices elsewhere and labelled choices by other participants. The foundation model improves on the training-sample median, and the gain disappears when visible choices are shuffled across decision makers. I then estimate one random-utility model over the foundation model's learned representation. This structural model applies the same utility function in every domain, retains most of the foundation model's reduction in prediction error, predicts domains excluded from utility estimation, and reproduces how behavioural measures co-move across people. The resulting model separates three objects: a learned common choice domain, one systematic utility function on that domain, and one random component that generates stochastic choice on observed menus.
People need to make many decisions every day, from choosing groceries in the supermarket to deciding on a mortgage or pension plan. These decisions often involve weighing risks, comparing options, trading off conflicting outcomes, and dealing with uncertainty. Economists have long tried to understand how people make su...
Why do consumers accept defaults (preset or suggested options)? This paper estimates a structural model that disentangles two frictions underlying default adherence: a deviation cost (the disutility when the final choice differs from the consumer’s ideal) and an opt-out cost (the effort to override the default). I esti...
We investigate the heritability of risk, uncertainty, and time preferences using a large-scale field experiment with adult twins, complemented by a comprehensive meta-analysis of prior studies. Our research introduces a novel empirical approach that integrates behavioral genetics with structural econometrics, enabling...
N. Kettlewell, Agnieszka Tymula, Hong Il Yoo· Management Sciences· 1 citation
It is shown that the (soft Q-learning) framework now prevalent in IRL is closely related to DDC models under additive extreme value preference shocks, yielding the same softmax (multinomial logit) choice probabilities and smooth Bellman equations that underpin structural estimation in economics.
Past research highlights failures of"procedural invariance"when measuring economic preferences using choices versus valuations. We reassess these failures by examining theoretical connections between choices and valuations when preferences are stable but measurements are noisy and individuals are heterogeneous. Even un...
Ted O'Donoghue, Charles D. Sprenger, P. Sung et al.· 0 citations
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