We test how donors respond to new information about a charity's effectiveness. Freedom from Hunger implemented a test of its direct marketing solicitations, varying letters by whether they include a discussion of their program's impact as measured by scientific research. The base script, used...

We formally model direct to consumer advertising (DTCA) of prescription drugs and examine factors that determine a pharmaceutical firm's DTCA strategy. We highlight how the profitability of DTCA varies with the characteristics of the condition that the advertised drug treats, the incidence of...

We document two new facts about the distributions of answers in famous statistical problems: they are i) multi-modal and ii) unstable with respect to irrelevant changes in the problem. We offer a model in which, when solving a problem, people represent each hypothesis by attending "bottom up" to...

Investigators of social differentials in health outcomes commonly augment incomplete micro data by appending socioeconomic characteristics of residential areas (such as median income in a zip code) to proxy for individual characteristics. However, little empirical attention has been paid to how...

In the Health and Retirement Survey respondents were asked about the chances they would live to 75 or to 85, and the chances they would work after age 62 or 65. We analyze the responses to determine if they behave like probabilities, if their averages are close to average probabilities in the...

Continuous-time Markov processes can be characterized conveniently by their infinitesimal generators. For such processes there exist forward and reverse-time generators. We show how to use these generators to construct moment conditions implied by stationary Markov processes. Generalized method...

This paper shows how probability questions can be answered within the context of macroeconometric models by using stochastic simulation. One can estimate, for example, the probability of a recession occurring within some fixed period in the future. Probability estimates are presented for two...

The -gambler's fallacy- is the belief that the probability of an event is lowered when that event has recently occurred, even though the probability of the event is objectively known to be independent from one trial to the next. This paper provides evidence on the time pattern of lottery...