We study response behavior of New York City parking-ticket recipients by analyzing administrative data on 6.6 million tickets issued to 2 million individuals over two years. Exploiting variation (from a policy change and a field experiment) in letters sent to recipients, we find that forgetting...

Deferred Acceptance (DA), a widely implemented algorithm, is meant to improve allocations: under classical preferences, it induces preference-concordant rankings. However, recent evidence shows that--in both real, large-stakes applications and experiments--participants frequently play seemingly...

This paper describes results of a pair of incentivized experiments on biases in judgments about random samples. Consistent with the Law of Small Numbers (LSN), participants exaggerated the likelihood that short sequences and random subsets of coin flips would be balanced between heads and tails....

We present a model of a financial market where some traders are "cursed" when choosing how much to invest in a risky asset, failing to fully take into account what prices convey about others' private information. Cursed traders put more weight on their private signals than rational traders. But...

How do people compare bundles of social-distancing behaviors? During the COVID pandemic, we showed 676 online respondents in the US, UK, and Israel 30 pairs of brief videos of acquaintances meeting. We asked them to indicate which in each pair depicted greater risk of COVID infection. Their...

The recent expansion of health-plan choice has been touted as increasing competition and enabling people to choose plans that fit their needs. This study provides new evidence challenging these proposed benefits of expanded health-insurance choice. We examine health-insurance decisions of...

We analyze the offering, asking, and granting of help or other benefits as a three-stage game with bilateral private information between a person in need of help and a potential help-giver. Asking entails the risk of rejection, which can be painful: since unawareness of the need can no longer be...