Panel conditioning occurs when participation in previous survey rounds affects how respondents answer questions in later rounds. I document panel conditioning effects in reported inflation expectations and other responses in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Survey of Consumer Expectations....

Manufacturers are increasingly producing and promoting sustainable products (i.e., products that have a positive social and/or environmental impact). However, relatively little is known about how product sustainability impacts consumers' preferences. We propose that sustainability may not always...

Inflation expectations play a vital role in determining inflation. Central bankers need to understand their intricacies and the information they can reveal. We look at the consistency of consumers' answers to questions on inflation expectations in the Bank of Canada's Canadian Survey of Consumer...

Across four studies, including one involving an actual monetary decision, the authors demonstrate that forming a product consideration set by excluding versus including alternatives induces consumers to place more weight on ethical attributes, such as company labor practices and animal testing....

In recent years, concerns about misinformation in the media have skyrocketed. President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that various news outlets are disseminating "fake news" for political purposes. But when the information contained in mainstream media news reports provides no clear clues...

Widespread misconceptions can be critical, especially in times of crisis. Through a field experiment, we study how to address such wrong or inaccurate beliefs using messages delivered to individual citizens using mobile phones. We focus on misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic in a...

We introduce a new class of preferences — which we call additive-belief-based (ABB) —that captures a general and yet tractable approach to belief-based utility, and that encompasses many popular models in the behavioral literature. We show that the general class of ABB preferences and two...

Economics has long studied how consumers respond to the disclosure of information about firms. We study a case in which the disclosed information is unrelated to the product or firm leadership, but which could still potentially affect consumer patronage through the mechanism of repugnance, as...

We develop and estimate a model of consumer search with spatial learning. Consumers make inferences from previously searched objects to unsearched objects that are nearby in attribute space, generating path dependence in search sequences. The estimated model rationalizes patterns in data on...

We propose a model of instrumental belief choice under loss aversion. When new information arrives, an agent is prompted to abandon her prior. However, potential posteriors may induce her to take actions that generate a lower utility in some states than actions induced by her prior. These losses...