In this paper, we run a series of experiments in order to investigate one possible cause of inconsistency in people’s behavior and concerns regarding online privacy. Even though individuals claim that privacy is very important, many end up revealing considerable private information in online...

Neuroeconomics uses knowledge about brain mechanisms to inform economic analysis, and roots economics in biology. It opens up the "black box" of the brain, much as organizational economics adds detail to the theory of the firm. Neuroscientists use many tools— including brain imaging, behavior...

The acknowledged importance of uncertainty in economic decision making has stimulated the search for neural signals that could influence learning and inform decision mechanisms. Current views distinguish two forms of uncertainty, namely risk and ambiguity, depending on whether the probability...

Market experiments designed to test whether individual errors are reduced by markets generally indicate that errors do make prices or trading volume irrational. For example, in markets for assets of uncertain value a "representativeness"- based theory predicts deviations of prices from Bayesian...

Linear models which fit regression equations to clinical judgments. then use the fitted parts of judgments as "bootstrapped" judgments, have outperformed clinical judgments in many tasks. Empirically, the phenomenon has been pervasive, but general conditions for the success of bootstrapping...

Commodity options are the right to buy or sell a specified quantity of a commodity, or commodity futures contract, at a specified price. The publicity surrounding several "boiler room" scams involving unwary buyers has given commodity options a bad name. Currently, only a handful of firms sell...

Recent research has demonstrated that choices between gambles are systematically influenced by the way they are expressed. Kahneman and Tversky's Prospect Theory (1979) explains many of these "framing" effects as shifts in the point of reference from which prospects are evaluated. This paper...

Attention utility is the hedonic pleasure or pain derived purely from paying attention to information. Using data on brokerage account logins by individual investors, we show that individuals devote disproportionate attention to already-known positive information about the performance of...

Using transaction data from a sample of 1.8 million credit card accounts, we provide the first field test of a major prediction of Prelec and Loewenstein’s (1998) theory of mental accounting. The prediction is that consumers will pay off expenditure on transient forms of consumption more...