When deciding to buy a product, consumers balance consumption utility against financial and psychological costs (pain-of-paying). It has been suggested that credit cards buffer against the pain-of-paying and thereby facilitate spending (the credit card “lift”). We show, first, that credit...

We consider the problem of defining all possible Bayesian truth serums for agents represented by a singly connected network (a tree graph). Agents receive signals according to a probability distribution that is common knowledge and that matches the network structure. The planner knows the...

Research examining the process of individual decision making over time is briefly reviewed. We focus on two major areas of work in choice dynamics: research that has examined how current choices are influenced by the history of previous choices, and newer work examining how choices may be made...

Despite recent interest in hyperbolic discounting, there has been little discussion of exactly what property of time preferences is instantiated by hyperbolic or quasi-hyperbolic functional forms. The paper revives an earlier proposal in Prelec (1989) that the key property is Pratt-Arrow...

Online platforms have the unique ability of offering virtually unlimited assortments. However, they often assume frictionless conditions in the purchase process which may not always hold in practice. We study the impact of heterogeneous search costs on the formation of consideration sets, and...

Cases of clear scientific misconduct have received significant media attention recently, but less flagrantly questionable research practices may be more prevalent and, ultimately, more damaging to the academic enterprise. Using an anonymous elicitation format supplemented by incentives for...

We consider the following ’truth serum’ mechanism problem: Two players observe signals drawn from a common prior on n x m. They are risk neutral, care only about mechanism payoffs, and will not provide information without incentives. A counterexample shows that one cannot construct a robust...