This chapter, originally written as a consequence of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, provides an elementary introduction to the concepts of risk and insurance. The main difficulty lies in assessing probabilities to judge whether premiums are appropriate and, in particular, for...

Setting CEO compensation is a critical but difficult task. Thus, given the lack of transparency that frequently accompanies such decisions, it is important to know whether it is subject to bias. We document the presence of illusory correlation in CEO compensation. By this we mean the use of...

Excess entry - or the high failure rate of market-entry decisions - is often attributed to overconfidence exhibited by entrepreneurs. We show analytically that whereas excess entry is an inevitable consequence of imperfect assessments of entrepreneurial skill, it does not imply overconfidence....

The importance of emotion in risk perception has been well documented in field and experimental studies. However, little is known about its role in everyday life. On thirty occasions over ten consecutive working days, ninety-four participants were prompted at random - via mobile telephones - to...

Whereas people are typically thought to be better off with more choices, studies show that they often prefer to choose from small as opposed to large sets of alternatives. We propose that satisfaction from choice is an inverted U-shaped function of the number of alternatives. This proposition is...

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, 1964)...

The experiential sampling method (ESM) was used to collect data from 74 part-time students who described and assessed the risks involved in their current activities when interrupted at random moments by text messages. The major categories of perceived risk were short-term in nature and involved...

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...