We build a model of online behavioral manipulation driven by AI advances. A platform dynamically offers one of n products to a user who slowly learns product quality. User learning depends on a product's "glossiness,' which captures attributes that make products appear more attractive than they...

Income is defined as the amount of funds, resources and/or time allowed to obtain goods over a specified period of time. This review discusses laboratory studies of income using methods of behavior analysis, behavioral pharmacology and behavioral economics. Initially, income was studied with...

We study the psychological costs of financial constraints and their economic consequences. Using a representative survey of U.S. households, we document the prevalence of financial stress in U.S. households and a strong relationship between financial stress and measures of financial constraints....

Matched transaction-level, credit-registry, and survey-based data reveal that consumers on average form excessively high (low) income expectations relative to ex-post realizations after unexpected positive (negative) income shocks. These extrapolative income expectations lead consumers to...

We investigate the relationship between (a) official information on COVID-19 infection and death case counts; (b) beliefs about such case counts, at present and in the future; (c) beliefs about average infection chance--in principle, directly calculable from (b); and (d) self-reported...

We examine the importance of information source (the 'messenger') on consumer choice in the context of cigarettes, electronic and tobacco. We proxy choice with intentions to use cigarettes and risk perceptions. We experimentally vary the messenger across three information sources: government,...

We propose new methods to model behavior and conduct welfare analysis in complex environments where some choices are unlikely to reveal preferences. We develop a mixture-of-experts model that incorporates heterogeneity in consumers' preferences and in their choice processes. We also develop a...

Costs of attention, while central to choice behavior, have proven hard to measure. We introduce a simple method of recovering them from choice data. Our recovery method rests on the observation that costs of attention play precisely the same role in consumer choice as do a competitive firm's...

In many health domains, we are concerned that observed links - for example, between "healthy" behaviors and good outcomes - are driven by selection into behavior. This paper considers the additional factor that these selection patterns may vary over time. When a particular health behavior...