We study two dimensions of complexity that may interfere with individual choice. The first one is object complexity, which corresponds to the difficulty in evaluating any given alternative in a choice set. The second dimension is composition complexity, which increases when suboptimal...

The main insight of this paper is that moral behavior does not necessarily alleviate coordination problems or may even worsen them, if individuals possess different degrees of morality. We characterize heterogenous Alger-Weibull morality preferences in a canonical model of voluntary...

We investigate whether violations of canonical axioms of choice under risk are mistakes or a manifestation of true preferences. First, we elicit axiom and gamble preferences and then allow subjects to revise their potentially conflicting preferences. Among the behavioral patterns that allow for...

We present a self- and social-signaling model formalizing findings in political psychology that moral and political judgments stem primarily from intuition and emotion, while reasoning serves to rationalize these intuitions to maintain an image of impartiality. In social interactions, agents’...

We study response behavior in surveys and propose a method to identify and improve the informativeness of survey evidence. First, we develop a choice model of survey response behavior under the assumption that responses imperfectly reveal respondents' characteristics due to limited...

We investigate the elasticity of moral ignorance with respect to monetary incentives and social norm information. We propose that individuals suffer from higher moral costs when rejecting a certain donation, and thus pay for moral ignorance. Consistent with our model, we find significant...

Do people anticipate the conditions that enable them to manipulate their beliefs when confronted with unpleasant information? We investigate whether individuals seek out the "cognitive flexibility" needed to distort beliefs in self-serving ways, or instead attempt to constrain it, committing to...

We consider the psychological and social foundations of human contributions and punishments in a voluntary contributions mechanism with punishment (VCMP). We eliminate 'dynamic economic linkages' between the two stages of our "modified" VCMP to rule out other potential explanations. We use a...

A large literature shows that people discount financial rewards hyperbolically instead of exponentially. While discounting of money has been questioned as a measure of time preferences, it continues to be highly relevant in empirical practice and predicts a wide range of real-world behaviors,...