Over the past several decades, economists, psychologists, and neuroscientists have conducted experiments in which a subject, human or animal, repeatedly chooses between alternative actions and is rewarded based on choice history. While individual choices are unpredictable, aggregate behavior...

This paper challenges the common assumption that economic agents know their tastes. After reviewing previous research showing that valuation of ordinary products and experiences can be manipulated by non-normative cues, we present three studies showing that in some cases people do not even have...

This paper challenges the common assumption that economic agents know their tastes. After reviewing previous research showing that valuation of ordinary products and experiences can be manipulated by non-normative cues, we present three studies showing that in some cases people do not even have...

When deciding to buy a product, consumers balance consumption utility against financial and psychological costs (pain-of-paying). It has been suggested that credit cards buffer against the pain-of-paying and thereby facilitate spending (the credit card “lift”). We show, first, that credit...

We consider the problem of defining all possible Bayesian truth serums for agents represented by a singly connected network (a tree graph). Agents receive signals according to a probability distribution that is common knowledge and that matches the network structure. The planner knows the...

Research examining the process of individual decision making over time is briefly reviewed. We focus on two major areas of work in choice dynamics: research that has examined how current choices are influenced by the history of previous choices, and newer work examining how choices may be made...

Despite recent interest in hyperbolic discounting, there has been little discussion of exactly what property of time preferences is instantiated by hyperbolic or quasi-hyperbolic functional forms. The paper revives an earlier proposal in Prelec (1989) that the key property is Pratt-Arrow...

Online platforms have the unique ability of offering virtually unlimited assortments. However, they often assume frictionless conditions in the purchase process which may not always hold in practice. We study the impact of heterogeneous search costs on the formation of consideration sets, and...