In daily life, people are often exposed to food temptations, such as ads for chocolate or friends offering cookies. This article examines how consumers respond to such food temptations. We investigate whether food temptations, differing in strength (weak vs. strong), lead consumers to eat more...

This paper attempts to provide an evolutionary explanation for humans' motivation to strive for money in present-day societies. We propose that people's desire for money is an adaptation of their desire for food. In three studies we show that feelings of financial and caloric scarcity are...

Recent models of altruism point out the success of a strategy called 'Raise-The-Stakes' (RTS) in situations allowing variability in cooperation. In theory, RTS is difficult to exploit because it begins with a small investment in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma Game. When its cooperation is...

We propose that weather conditions can influence consumers’ engagement in lottery play. A longitudinal study on the extent of lottery play in Belgium shows that lottery expenditures are indeed higher after reduced exposure to sunshine, even after controlling for people’s inertia,...

The present paper shows that when a person has the experience of giving advice but that advice is not acted upon, there is a reduced openness to external information. We call this the “referral backfire effect”. We argue that this referral backfire effect is due to the identity threatening...

We conducted an experiment to collect data on consumption decisions made by children of different age categories. In particular, our experiment involves unsophisticated discrete consumption choices,and we present a rationality test that is specially designed for the resulting choice data. Our...

We propose a method to quantify the willingness-to-pay for the consumption of others in group decisions. Our method is based on revealed preference theory. It measures willingness-to-pay for others' consumption by evaluating positive consumption externalities in monetary terms. Within the...

Neuroscientific studies demonstrate that erotic stimuli activate the reward circuitry processing monetary and drug rewards. Theoretically, a general reward system may give rise to nonspecific effects: exposure to "hot stimuli" from one domain may thus affect decisions in a different domain. We...

People are often exposed to actionable food temptations (i.e., an immediate opportunity to consume, like when friends offer cookies) and nonactionable food temptations (i.e., no immediate consumption opportunity, like ads for chocolate). The results of three experiments suggest that prior...