Dispositional optimism is a personality trait associated with individuals who believe, either rightly or wrongly, that in general good things tend to happen to them more often than bad things. Using a novel longitudinal data set that tracks the job search performance of MBA students, we show...

Whether judgment and decision making biases improve with experience remains an important and contentious question. Positive illusions, for example, have been documented extensively, but virtually always in single-shot settings. To what extent do these illusions persist over time? And what...

A question of increasing interest to researchers in a variety of fields is whether the incentives and experience present in many "real world" settings mitigate judgment and decision-making biases. To investigate this question, we analyze the decision making of National Football League teams...

In randomized field experiments, we embedded one- to two-sentence anchoring, goal-setting, or savings threshold cues in emails to employees about their 401(k) savings plan. We find that anchors increase or decrease 401(k) contribution rates by up to 1.9% of income. A high savings goal example...

Many decision makers operate in dynamic environments in which markets, competitors, and technology change regularly. The ability to detect and respond to these regime shifts is critical for economic success. We conduct three experiments to test how effective individuals are at detecting such...