According to the Description-Experience gap (DE gap), people act as if overweighting rare events when information about those events is derived from descriptions but as if underweighting rare events when they experience them through a sampling process. While the is now clear evidence that the DE...

The Description-Experience gap (DE gap) is widely thought of as a tendency for people to act as if overweighting rare events when information about those events is derived from descriptions but as if underweighting rare events when they experience them through a sampling process. While there is...

The game-theoretic assumption of common knowledge of rationality leads to paradoxes when rationality is represented in a Bayesian framework as cautious expected utility maximisation with independent beliefs (ICEU). We diagnose and resolve these paradoxes by presenting a new class of formal...

This paper reports experimental tests of two alternative explanations of how players use focal points to select equilibria in one-shot coordination games. Cognitive hierarchy theory explains coordination as the result of common beliefs about players' pre-reflective inclinations towards the...

Previous studies suggest that two otherwise robust 'anomalies' - preference reversals and disparities between buying and selling valuations - are eroded when respondents participate in repeated markets. We report an experiment which investigates whether this is true when factors neglected in...

We present a new theory of decision under risk called third-generation prospect theory. A novel feature of our version of prospect theory is that, by allowing reference points to be uncertain, it is able to accommodate the phenomenon of preference reversal. While several previous theories of...

We investigate whether there is a link between conditional cooperation and betrayal aversion. We use a public goods game to classify subjects by type of contribution preference and by belief about the contributions of others; and we measure betrayal aversion for different categories of subject....

In the last thirty years, economists and other social scientists have investigated people's normative views on distributive justice. Here we study people's normative views in social dilemmas, which underlie many situations of economic and social significance. Using insights from moral philosophy...

We report two studies investigating whether, and if so how, different interventions affect voter registration rates. In a natural field experiment conducted before the 2015 UK General Election, we varied messages on a postcard sent by Oxford City Council to unregistered student voters...

Policymakers are increasingly interested these days in how they can achieve desired outcomes using 'nudges' - low-cost and non-obtrusive interventions which rely on psychological mechanisms, rather than high-powered economic incentives, to influence people's behaviour. This paper applies the...