Numerous laboratory studies find that minor nuances of presentation and description change behavior in ways that are inconsistent with standard economic models. How much do these context effect matter in natural settings, when consumers make large, real decisions and have the opportunity to...

The economics of "happiness" shares a feature with behavioral economics that raises questions about its usefulness in public policy analysis. What happiness economists call "habituation" refers to the fact that people's reported well-being reverts to a base level, even after major life events...

Recent theories suggest that both risk and mispricing are associated with commonality in security returns, and that the loadings on characteristic-based factors can be used to predict future returns. We supplement the market factor with two mispricing factors which capture long- and...

We find consistent evidence of negative autocorrelation in decision-making that is unrelated to the merits of the cases considered in three separate high-stakes field settings: refugee asylum court decisions, loan application reviews, and major league baseball umpire pitch calls. The evidence is...

We present a general approach to experimentally testing candidate reference points. This approach builds from Prospect Theory's prediction that an increase in payoffs is perfectly offset by an equivalent increase in the reference point. Violation of this prediction can be tested with...

We document two new facts about the distributions of answers in famous statistical problems: they are i) multi-modal and ii) unstable with respect to irrelevant changes in the problem. We offer a model in which, when solving a problem, people represent each hypothesis by attending "bottom up" to...