Together with his long-time colleague Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, provided the intellectual infrastructure for contemporary behavioral law and economics. Prospect theory undermines the Coase Theorem, which is the bedrock of traditional law and economics; and the heuristics and biases research...

We examine two departures of individual perceptions of randomness from probability theory: the hot hand and the gambler's fallacy, and their respective opposites. This paper's first contribution is to use data from the field (individuals playing roulette in a casino) to demonstrate the existence...

Imagine that you have just received a colon cancer diagnosis and need to choose between two different surgical treatments. One surgery, the ``complicated surgery,'' has a lower mortality rate (16\% vs.\ 20\%) but compared to the other surgery, the ``uncomplicated surgery,'' also carries an...

This paper tests whether logically equivalent risk formats can lead to different health state utilities elicited by means of the traditional standard gamble (SG) method and a modified version of the method that we call ``double lottery.'' We compare utilities for health states elicited when...

The principle of loss aversion is thought to explain a wide range of anomalous phenomena involving tradeoffs between losses and gains. In this article, I show that the anomalies loss aversion was introduced to explain --- the risky bet premium, the endowment effect, and the status-quo bias ---...

According to regulatory fit theory (Higgins, 2000), when people make decisions with strategies that sustain their regulatory focus orientation, they ``feel right'' about what they are doing, and this ``feeling-right'' experience then transfers to subsequent choices, decisions, and evaluations....

When survey respondents rate the quality of life (QoL) associated with a health condition, they must not only evaluate the health condition itself, but must also interpret the meaning of the rating scale in order to assign a specific value. The way that respondents approach this task depends on...

An experienced decision aider reflects on how misaligned priorities produce decision research that is less useful than it could be. Scientific interest and professional standing may motivate researchers --- and their funders and publishers --- more powerfully than concern to help people make...

Across many real-world domains, men engage in more risky behaviors than do women. To examine some of the beliefs and preferences that underlie this difference, 657 participants assessed their likelihood of engaging in various risky activities relating to four different domains (gambling, health,...

According to prospect theory, people overweight low probability events and underweight high probability events. Several recent papers (notably, Hertwig, Barron, Weber \& Erev, 2004) have argued that although this pattern holds for ``description-based'' decisions, in which people are explicitly...