An experiment involving a simulated financial lending organization was used to compare subjects' decisions regarding the degree to which the organization should be informationally centralized, with that of an optimal decision rule based on a normative model. Typically, subjects overdecentralized...

Arousal is a diffuse emotional response that can have multiple effects. We present three studies that investigated arousal's effects on auctions, which are increasingly important engines of contemporary economies and represent social contexts particularly likely to generate and be influenced by...

The development of trust, a fundamental, complex aspect of human interaction, requires a combination of both controlled and automatic mental processes. Most trust models suggest that individuals' cognitive consciousness assess whether to trust. Nonconscious cognitive processes, however, can also...

Research on the distribution of resources typically focuses on anticipated outcomes. This paper investigates the social norms people use to distribute adventitious (unanticipated) outcomes. Participants in this study read a scenario where either they, or the person they were with (an...