We study how people’s own evaluation of choice options influences their estimates of other people’s evaluations when their choices are known. People draw a parallel between themselves and others based on the known choice, and conditionally project their own evaluations of the corresponding...

How does the anticipated connectedness between one’s current and future identity help explain impatience in intertemporal preferences? The less consumers are closely connected psychologically to their future selves, the less willing they will be to forgo immediate benefits in order to ensure...

We study how a person’s evaluation of choice options influences her estimates of other people’s evaluations when their choices are known. People rely on the relation between their own evaluations and their final decision to make sense of others, projecting their evaluations of the...

Language is pervasive and hence a common factor in people’s decision making. Prior research has mostly studied the effects of comprehensible language, language that communicates a literal meaning to consumers – on behavior and attitudes. In this paper, we investigate the potential for...

Statistical forecasts are increasingly prevalent. How do forecasts affect people’s beliefs about corresponding future events? This research proposes that the format in which the forecast is communicated biases its interpretation. We contrast two common forecast formats: chance (e.g., the...

People making decisions for others often do not choose what their recipients want. Prior research has generally explained such preference mismatches as decision makers mispredicting recipients’ satisfaction. We propose a smile-seeking hypothesis as a distinct cause for these mismatches in the...

Consumers' intertemporal preferences have been studied across multiple theoretical and applied areas. This article outlines research showing that the context in which intertemporal preferences are expressed matters, as well as research exploring the mechanisms that account for these effects....

The decision of whether to control for covariates, and how to select which covariates to include, is ubiquitous in psychological research. Failing to control for valid covariates can yield biased parameter estimates in correlational analyses or in imperfectly randomized experiments and...

Accurately estimating the probability distribution arising from repeated events with known probabilities, such as the number of heads in ten coin flips, represents a simple aptitude necessary for Bayesian updating and optimal decisions in the face of future uncertainty. Across elicitation...

Although incentives can be a powerful motivator of behavior, research on intrinsic motivation has suggested that rewards can crowd-out task interest, reducing engagement when rewards end. This research has resulted in widespread skepticism among practitioners and academics alike about using...