We study the effects of annuitization compared to spending down a lump-sum on consumption and subjective wellbeing. Analyzing longitudinal data on UK retirees before and after the pension reform that provided greater freedom to draw down savings, we find that annuitization increased retirees’...

New technologies increase opportunities and pressures to learn new skills. Research on "desirable difficulties" has shown, however, that learners are often poor judges of the strategies for learning - e.g., they fail to appreciate that spacing experiences with a task out over time will enhance...

When drawing inferences about a person’s personal characteristics from their actions, “correspondence bias” is the tendency to overestimate the influence of those characteristics and underestimate the influence of situational factors, such as incentives the individual faces. We build a...

People engage in self-promotional behavior because they want others to hold favorable images of them. Self-promotion, however, entails a tradeoff between conveying one’s positive attributes and being seen as bragging. We propose that people get this tradeoff wrong because they erroneously...

In 5 experiments we show that choices between bundles of consumption goods exhibit a preference for ‘order’ that cannot be explained on the basis of utility for consumption itself. The first 3 experiments show that this order-preference is strong and produces robust violations of normative...

It is widely believed that people are willing to expend greater resources to save the lives of identified victims than to save equal numbers of unidentified or statistical victims. There are many possible causes of this disparity which have not been enumerated previously or tested empirically....

In three experiments, subjects stated their willingness to accept pain ? from listening to annoying sounds ? in exchange for payment (WTA). Subjects were presented with annoying sounds of different durations, indicated their WTA, and received the sounds and payment that resulted from their...

In an effort to address persistent consumer privacy concerns, policy makers and the data industry seem to have found common grounds in proposals that aim at making online privacy more “transparent.” Such self-regulatory approaches rely on, among other things, providing more and better...