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The mathematical representation of Brunswik’s lens model has been used extensively to study human judgment and provides a unique opportunity to conduct a meta-analysis of studies that covers roughly five decades. Specifically, we analyze statistics of the “lens model equation” (Tucker,...

Several factors affect attitudes toward ambiguity. What happens, however, when people are asked to exchange an ambiguous alternative in their possession for an unambiguous one? We present three experiments in which individuals preferred to retain the former. This status quo bias emerged both...

An important problem in descriptive and prescriptive research in decision making is to identify "regions of rationality," i.e., the areas for which simple, heuristic models are and are not effective. To map the contours of such regions, we derive probabilities that models identify the best of m...

Determining what influences mood is important for theories of emotion and research on subjective well-being. We consider three sets of factors: activities in which people are engaged; individual differences; and incidental variables that capture when mood is measured, e.g., time-of-day. These...

A series of studies investigate the decision processes of actuaries, underwriters, and reinsurers in setting premiums for ambiguous and uncertain risks. Survey data on prices reveal that all three types of these insurance decision makers are risk averse and ambiguity averse. In addition, groups...

The effectiveness of decision rules depends on characteristics of both rules and environments. A theoretical analysis of environments specifies the relative predictive accuracies of the “take-the-bestâ€\x9D heuristic (TTB) and other simple strategies for choices between two outcomes...

The demands of 'representative design' set a high methodological standard. Both experimental participants and the situations with which they are faced should be representative of the populations to which researchers claim to generalize results. Failure to observe the latter has led to notable...

Whereas much literature has documented difficulties in making probabilistic inferences, it has also emphasized the importance of task characteristics in determining judgmental accuracy. Noting that people exhibit remarkable efficiency in encoding frequency information sequentially, we construct...