For products that require skills to use, such as computers, cell phones, and sports equipment, consumers’ purchase and usage decisions often depend on their prediction of the speed with which they will master the relevant skills. In this article, we identify a systematic pessimism in...

New marketing paradigms that exploit the capabilities for data collection, aggregation, and dissemination introduced by the Internet provide benefits to consumers but also pose real or perceived privacy hazards. In four experiments, we seek to understand consumer decisions to reveal or withhold...

Disclosure is often proposed as a remedy for conflicts of interest, but it can backfire, hurting those whom it is intended to protect. Building on our prior research, we introduce a conceptual model of disclosure’s effects on advisors and advice recipients that helps to explain when and why it...

Consumers often choose how quickly to consume things they enjoy. The research presented here demonstrates that they tend to consume too rapidly, growing tired of initially well-liked stimuli such as a favorite snack (experiments 1 and 4) or an enjoyable video game (experiments 2 and 3) more...

Consumers often behave differently than they would ideally like to behave. We propose that an anticipatory pain of paying drives "tightwads" to spend less than they would ideally like to spend. "Spendthrifts," by contrast, experience too little pain of paying and typically spend more than they...

Previous work on the endowment effect has demonstrated that current ownership status affects object valuation and that this effect occurs instantaneously on possession of an object. The current work presents findings from four studies which indicate that the history of past ownership can also...

The most recent wave of decision research goes beyond the usual critiques of linear probability weighting, exponential discounting, and other specialized assumptions, and challenges some of the most basic assumptions of the decision-making paradigm itself. In response to these challenges,...