Some food items that are commonly considered unhealthy also tend to elicit impulsive responses. The pain of paying in cash can curb impulsive urges to purchase such unhealthy food products. Credit card payments, in contrast, are relatively painless and weaken impulse control. Consequently,...

In this paper, we investigate how social image concerns affect women's decisions to compete. We first propose a theoretical model to show that participating in a competition is costly for women from the social image viewpoint, since such behavior deviates from traditional female gender norms....

We test the hypothesis that strategic interactions foster overconfidence. We experimentally compare an environment where players have an incentive to overstate their own ability to deter competitors, with one where this incentive is removed. We find that overconfidence persists in the former...

Radon exposure in homes is a leading cause of lung cancer, but the rate at which householders test for it is low. In a pre-registered experiment with a nationally representative sample of adults (N = 1,700), we used psychological theory to design interventions to increase perceived risk from...

Intertemporal choices are a ubiquitous class of decisions that involve selecting between outcomes available at different times in the future. We investigated the neural systems supporting intertemporal decisions in healthy younger and older adults. Using functional neuroimaging, we find that...

The sunk cost effect is considered as an important bias and perceived to be a widespread phenomenon in individual decisions. However, the evidence from field data and field and laboratory experiments is inconclusive. We present a laboratory experiment, designed to investigate the sunk cost bias...

Evidence from hypothetical scenarios strongly suggests the existence of a sunk cost bias, the tendency to ‘throw good money after bad money.’ However, the few studies using incentives are inconclusive. In addition, evidence on potential psychological channels underlying such a bias is...

Evidence from hypothetical scenarios strongly suggests the existence of a sunk cost bias, the tendency to ‘throw good money after bad money.’ However, the few studies using incentives are inconclusive. In addition, evidence on potential psychological channels underlying such a bias is...

Mithilfe von Experimenten lassen sich Entscheidungen und kognitive Verzerrungen in einem kontrollierten Umfeld untersuchen. Erkenntnisse aus Experimenten können Aufschluss darüber geben, wie Nudges effektiv und effizient angewendet werden können und wo von deren Nutzung abgesehen werden...

We validate experimentally a new survey item to measure the preference for competition. The item, which measures participants' agreement with the statement "Competition brings the best out of me", predicts individuals' willingness to compete in the laboratory after controlling for their ability,...