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...

Much of empirical economics involves regression analysis. However, does the presentation of results affect economists ability to make inferences for decision making purposes? In a survey, 257 academic economists were asked to make probabilistic inferences on the basis of the outputs of a...

Whereas much literature exists on choice overload, little is known about effects of numbers of alternatives in donation decisions. How do these affect both the size and distribution of donations? We hypothesize that donations are affected by the reputation of recipients and increase with their...

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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,...

Does the manner in which results are presented in empirical studies affect perceptions of the predictability of the outcomes? Noting the predominant role of linear regression analysis in empirical economics, we asked 257 academic economists to make probabilistic inferences based on different...

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...