McDermott, Folwer, and Smirnov (Journal of Politics, 2008): Evolutionary origin of prospect theory. Basic assumption: in some period, an individual must acquire a minimum threshold tau of food in order to live to the next period. Using optimal foraging theory, they show that context-dependent risk aversion and risk-seeking behavior have their evolutionary advantage when the probability of survival depends on the amount of food epsilon an individual acquires from the environment: Pr(epsilon > tau.)
Sozou (The Royal Society, 1998): On hyperbolic discounting and uncertain hazard rates. Basic assumption: there is a risk that the reward will not be realized. For constant hazard rate, exponential time-preferences follow. When there is uncertainty in the underlying hazard rate, hyperbolic discounting can be derived given certain given exponential prior distribution of the hazard rate.
