Auctions, normally considered as devices facilitating trade, also provide a way to probe mechanisms governing one's valuation of some good or action. One of the most intriguing phenomena in auction behavior is the winner's curse --- the strong tendency of participants to bid more than rational...

Contrasting cognitive and physical decline, research in emotional aging suggests that most older adults enjoy high levels of affective well-being and emotional stability into their 70s and 80s. We investigate the contributions of age-related changes in emotional motivation and competence to...

Contrary to the common belief that more information is always better, Gigerenzer et al.\ (1999) showed that simple decision strategies which rely on little information can be quite successful. The success of simple strategies depends both on bets about the structure of the environment and on the...

We conducted two experiments comparing younger and older adults' ability to adjust their foraging behavior as a function of task characteristics. Participants foraged for fish in a virtual landscape and had to decide when to move between ponds so as to maximize the number of fish caught. In the...

Some people find it more difficult to delay rewards than others. In three experiments, we tested a ``future self-continuity'' hypothesis that individual differences in the perception of one's present self as continuous with a future self would be associated with measures of saving in the...