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...

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...

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...

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...

An important problem in descriptive and prescriptive research in decision making is to identify "regions of rationality," i.e., the areas for which simple, heuristic models are and are not effective. To map the contours of such regions, we derive probabilities that models identify the best of m...

Determining what influences mood is important for theories of emotion and research on subjective well-being. We consider three sets of factors: activities in which people are engaged; individual differences; and incidental variables that capture when mood is measured, e.g., time-of-day. These...

Confidence in decision making is an important dimension of managerial behavior. However, what is the relation between confidence, on the one hand, and the fact of receiving or expecting to receive feedback on decisions taken, on the other hand? To explore this and related issues in the context...

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...

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...