Regret and its anticipation affect a wide range of decisions. Job-seekers reject offers while waiting for an offer to match their best past offer; investors hold on to badly performing stocks; and managers throw good money after bad projects. We analyze behavior of a decision maker with regret preferences in a dynamic context and show that regret agents have a disposition to gamble until they receive a payoff matching the best past offer. Results from a lab experiment confirm that many subjects exhibit such behavior and are reluctant to stop below the past peak.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may AbstractThis paper considers the impact of changes in governments' payment discipline on the private sector. We argue that increased delays in public payments can affect private sector liquidity and profits and hence ultimately economic growth. We test this prediction empirically for European Union countries using two complementary approaches. First, we use annual panel data, including a newly constructed proxy for government arrears. Using panel data techniques, including methods that allow for endogeneity, we find that payment delays and to some extent estimated arrears lead to a higher likelihood of bankruptcy, lower profits, and lower economic growth. While this approach allows a broad set of variables to be included, it restricts the number of time periods. We therefore complement it with a Bayesian VAR approach on quarterly data for selected countries faced with significant payment delays. With this second approach, we also find that the likelihood of bankruptcies rises when the governments increase the average payment period. JEL Classification Numbers: E6, H6, H8Keywords: Public Payment Delays, Government Arrears, Accounts Payable, Government Spending. ECB Working Paper 1771, March 2015 1 Non-Technical SummaryThe issue of government arrears has gained prominence during the European sovereign debt crisis. Particularly in EU/IMF programme countries -both in and outside the euro area -but also in other fiscally vulnerable economies, such as Italy and Spain, the identified amounts were considerable and measures to reduce the stock of arrears featured prominently in government strategies and as programme targets.To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to systematically address and econometrically estimate the economic impact of public spending delays and arrears. Our key contributions are twofold. First, we put forward a statistical measure that can serve as a proxy for arrears. Second, we use this and other measures of payment delays to gauge the short-term effect on some key economic variables.Our empirical results from annual panel data across the EU-27 countries suggest that payment delays may reduce profits, increase the likelihood of bankruptcies and, ultimately, slow economic growth. While the exact size of such effects is hard to estimate from the available data, results are significant in most specifications. On average for the European Union sample, the total amount of outstanding payment...

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. optimal choice in an optimal stopping task. We derive the optimal strategy under such regret preferences, and show how it is different from that of an expected utility maximizer. We also show that if the decision maker never commits mistakes the behavior resulting from this strategy is observationally equivalent to that of an expected utility maximizer. Terms of use: Documents inWe then test our theoretical predictions in the laboratory. The results from a structural discrete choice model we fit to our data provide strong evidence that many people's stopping behavior is largely determined by the anticipation of and aversion to regret.JEL-Classification: D03, C91

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. (MEU, Gilboa & Schmeidler, 1989;Epstein & Schneider, 2003b). Observed investment behavior is at odds with the SEU prediction and deviates in a direction predicted by MEU models. On average, subjects in a treatment group, facing an ambiguous random walk, exhibit an ambiguity premium that presents a mark-up on average reservation profits in a control group. Terms of use: Documents inHence, subjects shun to expose themselves to an ambiguous payoff process and invest later than participants facing a risky payoff process.JEL-Classification: D08, D83

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Unlike earlier studies, that used the pseuo-EM algorithm of Dempster, Laird & Rubin (1977) to estimate the model, this paper describes how to make use of recent advances in Bayesian inference on mixture models. This way, one is able to surmount some well-known issues connected to inference on mixture models, e.g. the label switching problem. The paper features a numerical simulation study to gauge the model performance in terms of convergence to true parameter values and a small empirical example involving US business cycles. Terms of use: Documents inJEL-Classification: C32, C38, E32, E37, E51