Most people are caring and will exert great effort to rescue individual victims whose needy plight comes to their attention. These same good people, however, often become numbly indifferent to the plight of individuals who are ``one of many'' in a much greater problem. Why does this occur? The...

Our previous research suggests that people reporting a stronger desire to maximize obtain worse life outcomes (Bruine de Bruin et al., 2007). Here, we examine whether this finding may be explained by the decision-making styles of self-reported maximizers. Expanding on Schwartz et al.\ (2002), we...

Ambiguity aversion has been widely observed in individuals' judgments. Using scenarios that are typical in decision analysis, we investigate ambiguity aversion for pairs of individuals. We examine risky and cautious shifts from individuals' original judgments to their judgments when they are...

Open-ended methods that elicit willingness-to-pay (WTP) in terms of absolute dollars often result in high rates of questionable and highly skewed responses, insensitivity to changes in health state, and raise an ethical issue related to its association with personal income. We conducted a 2x2...

Economic games involving allocation of resources have been a useful tool for the study of decision making for both psychologists and economists. In two experiments involving a repeated-trials game over twenty opportunities, undergraduates made choices to distribute resources between themselves...

Previous research has identified important determinants of overall evaluations for experiences lived across time. By means of a novel guessing task, I study what decision-makers themselves consider important. As \emph{Informants}, some participants live and evaluate an experience. As...

We study whether probability weighting is observed when individuals are presented with a series of choices between lotteries consisting of real non-monetary adverse outcomes, electric shocks. Our estimation of the parameters of the probability weighting function proposed by Tversky and Kahneman...

The Ratio-Bias phenomenon, observed by psychologist Seymour Epstein and colleagues, is a systematic manifestation of irrationality. When offered a choice between two lotteries, individuals consistently choose the lottery with the greater number of potential successes, even when it offers a...

This paper reports two experiments comparing variants of multiple explanation applied in the early stages of a judgment task (a case involving employee theft) where participants are not given a menu of response options. Because prior research has focused on situations where response options are...