Seven studies test the hypothesis that people use subjective time progression in hedonic evaluation. When people believe that time has passed unexpectedly quickly, they rate tasks as more engaging, noises as less irritating, and songs as more enjoyable. We propose that felt time distortion...

Can social preferences sustain a for-profit company? We analyze panel data tracking payments of 57,196 customers for five years from an online retail firm whose profitability relies on consumers' altruism. Most customers are generous and remain so over time. However, their generosity slowly...

Do people have an irrational dislike for risk? People pay less for uncertain prospects than their worst possible outcomes (Gneezy, List, and Wu 2006), and researchers have proposed that this effect occurs because people strongly dislike risk. We challenge this proposition across seven studies....

Consumers are influenced by the metaphoric relationship between cardinal direction and vertical position (i.e., quot;north is upquot;). People think it will take longer to travel north than south (Study 1), that it will cost more to ship to a northern than to a southern location (Studies 2 and...