Is variety of the spice of life? The present research suggests that the answer depends on the rate of consumption. In three experiments, we find that, whereas a variety of stimuli is preferred to repetition of even a better-liked single stimulus when consumption is continuous, this preference...

Individuals are generally reluctant to trade goods---a phenomenon identified as the endowment effect. This paper focuses on consumers' puzzling reluctance to exchange gambles, and in particular lottery tickets with identical distribution (i.e., same odds of winning), and identifies the ticket's...

Using Kahneman and Tversky's life-death decision paradigm, Wang and colleagues (e.g., Wang & Johnston, 1995; Wang, 1996a, 1996b, 1996c, 2008; Wang et al., 2001) have shown two characteristic phenomena regarding people's attitude to risk when the contextual group size is manipulated. In both positive and...

The current field study compares the time preferences of young adults of similar ages but in two very different environments, one more dangerous and uncertain than the other. Soldiers, college students and a control group of teenagers answered questionnaires about their time preferences. During...

Indecisiveness is an individual difference measure of chronic difficulty and delay in decision making. Indecisiveness is associated with low decisional confidence and distinct patterns of pre-choice information search behavior. The present study explored whether the confidence levels and search...

The article shows that when people consider differentiated goods or services that differ in price and quality, they exhibit a decision-making bias of ``relative thinking'': relative price differences affect them even when economic theory suggests that only absolute price differences matter. This...

People must often perform calculations in order to produce a numeric estimate (e.g., a grocery-store shopper estimating the total price of his or her shopping cart contents). The current studies were designed to test whether estimates based on calculations are influenced by comparisons with...

Similar to research on risky choice, the traditional analysis of intertemporal choice takes the view that an individual behaves so as to maximize the discounted sum of all future utilities. The well-known Allais paradox contradicts the fundamental postulates of maximizing the expected value or...

We investigated the extent to which the human capacity for recognition helps to forecast political elections: We compared naive recognition-based election forecasts computed from convenience samples of citizens' recognition of party names to (i) standard polling forecasts computed from...

Introduction to the second part of an extended special issue.