Repeated search and decision making is a common consumer activity that should benefit from advanced planning. In three simulated shopping experiments, we find that people often fail to plan spontaneously or, when they do plan, do not use an appropriate mental model of the search problem. We also...

Valuation of goods often proceeds from a series of hypothetical pairwise choices. We examine reference dependence on the outcome of such evaluations in a large-scale study in which respondents make a series of choices between areas that differ on cost of living and the quality of lakes and...