People making decisions for others often do not choose what their recipients want. Prior research has generally explained such preference mismatches as decision makers mispredicting recipients’ satisfaction. We propose a smile-seeking hypothesis as a distinct cause for these mismatches in the...

Consumers sometimes prefer to repeat their past choices, while other times the same consumer prefers to try something new. We demonstrate that a consumers’ situational future outlook, that is, local optimism or pessimism about an imminent outcome, can systematically affect the sequential...