Are people skillful in utilizing focal points for coordination? We present evidence indicating that people over-rely on prominence-based salience and under-rely on distinctiveness and thus frequently fail to leverage potential focal points. Across several games, we experimentally observe that...

Standard economic analysis assumes that people make choices that maximize their utility. Yet both popular discourse and other fields assume that people sometimes fail to make optimal choices and thus adversely affect their own happiness. Most social sciences thus frequently describe some...

Standard economic analysis assumes that people make choices that maximize their utility. Yet both popular discourse and other fields assume that people sometimes fail to make optimal choices and thus adversely affect their own happiness. Most social sciences thus frequently describe some...

Most theories of decision making are consequentialist. They presume that people evaluate prospects on the basis of potential outcomes. However, people may often conceptualize prospects in part non-consequentially. Consider someone evaluating a new, “focal” prospect given an unresolved...

Many theories identify selfishness and lack of caring about others as the fundamental impediments to cooperation. We highlight a different source of non-cooperative behavior: People's caring can be abundant but fail to activate. We present an attribution-based, game-theoretic model in which...

Behavioral decision researchers have documented a number of anomalies that seem to run counter to established theories of consumer behavior from microeconomics that are often at the core of analytical models in marketing. A natural question therefore is how equilibrium behavior and strategies...

Standard economic analysis assumes that people make choices that maximize their utility. Yet both popular discourse and other fields assume that people sometimes fail to make optimal choices and thus adversely affect their own happiness. Most social sciences thus frequently describe some...

Making effective decisions under risk often requires making accurate predictions of other people’s decisions under risk. We experimentally assess the accuracy of people’s predictions of others’ risky choices. In four studies, we find evidence of systematic inaccuracy: predictions of...

We experimentally investigate people’s evaluations of incentive pay contracts and people’s predictions of others’ evaluations of incentive pay contracts. We emphasize that the construction of evaluations and predictions often includes two substeps, involving likelihood judgment and...

We examine three determinants of the relationship between the magnitude of a stimulus and a person's subjective value of the stimulus: the process by which value is assessed (either by feeling or by calculation),the evaluability of the relevantmagnitude variable (whether the desirability of a...