Overwhelming evidence from the cognitive sciences shows that, in simple discrimination tasks (determining what is louder, longer, brighter, or even which number is larger) humans make more mistakes and decide more slowly when the stimuli are closer along the relevant scale. We investigate to...

Influential economic approaches as random utility models or quantal-response equilibria assume a monotonic relation between error rates and choice difficulty or "strength of preference", in line with widespread evidence from discrimination tasks in psychology and neuroscience. However, while the...

Differences in cognitive sophistication and effort are at the root of behavioral heterogeneity in economics. To explain this heterogeneity, behavioral models assume that certain choices indicate higher cognitive effort. A fundamental problem with this approach is that observing a choice does not...

Behavioral heterogeneity arising from cognitive differences among economic agents plays a fundamental role in the economy. To explain this heterogeneity, models of iterative thinking assume that certain choices indicate higher cognitive effort. That is, choices are used to infer the cognitive...

Influential economic approaches as random utility models assume a monotonic relation between choice frequencies and "strength of preference," in line with widespread evidence from the cognitive sciences, which also document an inverse relation to response times. However, for economic decisions...

The preference reversal phenomenon is one of the most important, long-standing, and widespread anomalies contradicting economic models of decisions under risk. It describes the robust observation of frequent "standard reversals" where long-shot gambles are valued above moderate ones but then the...

Preferences over risky alternatives can be elicited by different methods, including direct pairwise choices and willingness-to-accept valuations. The results are frequently at odds, casting doubts on the foundations of economics. We develop a stochastic choice model predicting when...

When an economic agent makes a choice, stochastic models predicting those choices can be updated. The structural assumptions embedded in the prior model condition the updated one, to the extent that the same evidence produces different predictions even when previous ones were identical. We...

We conduct a large scale randomized field experiment to study whether providing recipients - 42,454 Chinese households in a rural area - with information on the costs of a real decision they make can help to improve the quality of their choices. The decisions are of high financial impact, as the...

Intuitive decision making has a large and often negative impact in economic decisions, but its measurement and quantification remains challenging. Following research from psychology, behavioral economists have often attempted to causally manipulate the balance of intuition and deliberation by...