We comprehensively investigate misperceptions about pro-social behavior and the extent to which punishment and rewarding is under- or overestimated in laboratory experiments. Our games and treatments cover a large range of decision environments, in which there are different (i) trade-offs (e.g.,...

A recent experimental literature has documented that people are (sometimes) asymmetric updaters: good news is over-weighted, relative to bad news. The phenomenon might be due to selective recall (SR), by which people recall better the positive than the negative evidence. To test this hypothesis,...

In preference reversals, subjects express different orderings over alternatives depending on how preferences are elicited. In classical reversal tasks, the so-called “standard reversal” sees subjects select a safe bet over a risky one with a similar expected value in a straight choice but...

We contribute to the literature on motivated reasoning with a novel experimental test of two economic theories that respectively predict a positivity bias when (1) the potential material losses due to the bias are relatively small or (2) the cognitive costs of the bias are small enough. In our...

In classical preference reversal (PR) experiments, participants often choose the safer of two gambles but express a higher monetary evaluation for the riskier. We use eye-tracking techniques to explore two hypotheses regarding how attention may influence such behavior. Taking into account recent...

In classical preference reversal (PR) experiments, participants often choose the safer of two gambles but express a higher monetary evaluation for the riskier. We use eye-tracking techniques to explore three hypotheses regarding how attention may influence such behavior, based on leading...