Strong growth in disposable income has inflated consumption to unprecedented, but not sustainable levels. In this process consumer behavior has been changing. To explain the driving forces of this development, the paper introduces a theory of evolving consumer preferences that is molded in an...

Many personally risky decisions, such as innovation and entrepreneurship, have the potential to increase overall welfare by creating positive externalities for society. Rewarding such prosocial risk-taking may be an important strategy in addressing societal challenges like, for example, the...

Do choices feed back into and alter preferences? Widespread evidence arising in psychology and neuroscience shows that preferences change in response to own choices, a phenomenon typically explained through cognitive dissonance. The evidence, however, presents serious shortcomings casting doubts...

In this paper, we hypothesize that the strength of the consensus effect, i.e., the tendency for people to overweight the prevalence of their own values and preferences when forming beliefs about others' values and preferences, depends on the salience of own preferences. We manipulate salience by...

Having an accurate account of preferences help governments design better policies for their citizens, organizations develop more efficient incentive schemes for their employees and adjust their product to better suit their clients' needs. The plethora of elicitation methods most commonly used...

Contrary to the traditional economic view that individuals misreport private information to maximize material payoffs, recent evidence highlights robust preferences for truth-telling among many decision-makers. Theoretical models that align with aggregate behavioral patterns posit that these...

We investigate whether violations of canonical axioms of choice under risk are mistakes or a manifestation of true preferences. First, we elicit axiom and gamble preferences and then allow subjects to revise their potentially conflicting preferences. Among the behavioral patterns that allow for...

In prosocial decisions, decision-makers are inherently uncertain about how their decisions impact others' utility - we call this interpersonal uncertainty. We show that people's response to interpersonal uncertainty shapes well-known patterns of prosocial behavior. First, using standard social...

A recent literature points to individuals having preferences for autonomy. Autonomy includes an individual's ability to choose a course of actions that meaning-fully affects his or her outcomes as well as an individual enjoying a certain degree of non-interference from others. In this paper we...

Both economists and psychologists are interested in understanding decision making under uncertainty. Yet, they rely on different concepts to analyse human behaviour: Economists use economic preference parameters rooted in utility theory, while psychologists use personality traits to describe...