'Epidemiological' models of belief formation put social interactions at their core; such models are widely used by scholars who are not economists to study the dynamics of beliefs in populations. We survey the literature in which economists attempting to model the consequences of beliefs about...

Sequential choices are ubiquitous in daily life, yet making optimal decisions in such settings--where properly accounting for option value is crucial--can be challenging. This paper provides field experimental evidence on the neglect of option value in high-stakes decisions and quantifies the...

Can incorporating expectations-based-reference-dependence (EBRD) considerations reduce seemingly dominated choices in the Deferred Acceptance (DA) mechanism? We run two experiments (total N = 500) where participants are randomly assigned into one of four DA variants--{static, dynamic} * {student...

We experimentally test how psychological motivations can impact the processing of purely objective information. We first document that, when the high-stakes College Entrance Exam is held in the month of Ramadan, Chinese Muslim students perform significantly worse. When asked about the impact of...

We study a sequential experimentation model with endogenous feedback. Agents choose between a safe and risky action, the latter generating stochastic rewards. When making this choice, each agent is selfishly motivated (myopic). However, agents can disclose their experiences to a public record,...

We study vote trading among U.S. Congress members. By tracking roll-call votes within bills across five legislatures and politicians' personal connections made during the school years, we document a propensity of connected legislators to vote together that depends on how salient the bill is to...

The central question we address in this paper is: what can an analyst infer from choice data about what a decision maker has learned? The key constraint we impose, which is shared across models of Bayesian learning, is that any learning must be rationalizable. To implement this constraint, we...

We explore the role of memory for choice behavior in unfamiliar environments. Using a unique data set, we document that decision makers exhibit a "memory premium." They tend to choose in-memory alternatives over out-of-memory ones, even when the latter are objectively better. Consistent with...

We propose a model to study when an intermediate action can serve as a "stepping stone" that enables the elimination of a harmful norm. While the intermediate action may facilitate the first "step", it may also become a new norm. We derive intuitive conditions for stepping stones, which depend...