We designed a commitment savings product for a Philippine bank and implemented it using a randomized control methodology. The savings product was intended for individuals who want to commit now to restrict access to their savings, and who were sophisticated enough to engage in such a mechanism....

In the last two decades, much has been published on the topic of culture and cross-cultural psychology and much on the topic of judgment and decision making (J/DM). However, only a few researchers have examined the intersection of the two areas. In this article, we review this body of research....

Intellectual property piracy is a significant global problem and an enormous problem for U.S. companies and policymakers. This article examines why typically law-abiding people are more inclined to steal intellectual property products than more tangible, material products. The authors propose...

We offer a framework about when and how specifications (e.g., megapixels of a camera and number of air bags in a massage chair) influence consumer preferences and report five studies that test the framework. Studies 1-3 show that even when consumers can directly experience the relevant products...

A central and still open question in consumer and happiness research is whether happiness depends on absolute or relative levels of wealth and consumption. To address this question the authors go to a finer level than overall happiness and distinguish three types of happiness: happiness from...

Studies show that consumers are often unaware of the price of their purchases. We examine if such ignorance may be willful. We develop a model entailing consumers who may feel conflicted about spending – some people have an inherent preference for overspending (“spendthrifts”). We show...

We designed a commitment savings product for a Philippine bank and implemented it using a randomized control methodology. The savings product was intended for individuals who want to commit now to restrict access to their savings, and who were sophisticated enough to engage in such a mechanism....

Satisfaction with a dynamic outcome is positively related to its value, the change in the value, and the rate of change. Proposed in this article is another outcome-satisfaction relation: Satisfaction is positively related to the change in the rate, or quasi-acceleration (QA). We tested this...

Darwin argued that emotional experience should be affected, in part, by feedback from the skeletal musculature. Since Darwin's time, researchers have documented that emotional experience is shaped by both facial and postural feedback. Two experiments were conducted to determine whether emotional...

Most happiness researchers use semantic differential or Likert scales to assess happiness. Such conventionally used scales are susceptible to scale renorming (interpretation of scales differently in different contexts) and can produce a specious relativism effect (e.g., rating a low-income...