We consider a decision maker who experiences transient preference shocks when faced with dynamic decision situations that involve intertemporal tradeoffs, such as those in consumption savings problems. We axiomatize a recursive representation of choice over infinite horizon consumption problems that features uncertain consumption utilities that evolve according to a subjective process that is iid. A generalization of the model introduces objective states of the world and accommodates persistent taste shocks that are transient, contingent on the state. In the corresponding representation the uncertainty about utilities depends on the exogenous state, which follows a subjective Markov process. The parameters of the representations, which are the subjective processes governing the evolution of beliefs over consumption utilities, and the discount factor, are uniquely identified from behavior. We characterize a natural notion of greater preference for flexibility in terms of a dilation of beliefs.

We study an individual who faces a dynamic decision problem in which the process of information arrival is unobserved by the analyst. We derive two utility representations of preferences over menus of acts that capture the individual's uncertainty about his future beliefs. The most general representation identi…es a unique probability distribution over the set of posteriors that the decision maker might face at the time of choosing from the menu. We use this representation to characterize a notion of "more preference for ‡exibility" via a subjective analogue of Blackwell's (1951Blackwell's ( , 1953 comparisons of experiments. A more specialized representation uniquely identi…es information as a partition of the state space. This result allows us to compare individuals who expect to learn di¤erently, even if they do not agree on their prior beliefs. We conclude by extending the basic model to accommodate an individual who expects to learn gradually over time by means of a subjective …ltration.

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We study a decision maker (DM) who has preferences over choice problems, which are sets of payoff allocations between herself and a passive recipient. An example of such a set is the collection of possible allocations in the classic dictator game. The choice of an allocation from the set is observed by the recipient, whereas the choice of the set itself is not. Behaving selfishly under observation, in the sense of not choosing the normatively best allocation, inflicts shame on the DM. We derive a representation that identifies the DM's private ranking of allocations, her subjective norm, and her shame. The normatively best allocation can be further characterized as the Nash solution of a bargaining game induced by the second‐stage choice problem.