Story-telling helps to define the human experience. Do people also use narratives to make sense of, and to act on, financial information? Three studies demonstrate that people's investment predictions and choices instead are by narrative thinking. Whereas neoclassical financial theory maintains...

Whether, and if so, how exactly gender differences are manifested in moral judgment has recently been at the center of much research on moral decision making. Previous research suggests that women are more deontological than men in personal, but not impersonal, moral dilemmas. However, typical...

An agent wants to derive her belief over outcomes based on past observations collected in her database (memory). There is well establish evidence in the psychology and marketing literature that agents consistently fail (or choose not) to process all available information. An agent might be...

This paper presents a new decision theory for modelling choice under risk. The new theory is a two-parameter generalization of expected utility theory. The proposed theory assumes that a decision maker: 1) behaves as if maximizing expected utility; but 2) may experience disappointment (elation)...

Empirical evidence suggests that choices are affected by the amount of time available to the decision maker. Time pressure or a cooling-off period (mandatory delay of choice) changes how choices are determined. Yet, few models are able to account for the role of available time on decisions. This...

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...

We investigate the relationship between subjective probabilities of future stock market returns and decisions about stockholding. Specifically, we examine whether acting upon subjective probabilities is confined to individuals with high cognitive skills. We explore this question using data from...

We study the effects of the presence of a negative stereotype on the formation of self-confidence and on decision-making in achievement-related situations. We take into account not only consumption utility but also psychological utility (ex-ante ego utility and ex-post disappointment/elation)....

Economists have been theorizing that other-regarding preferences influence decision making. Yet, what are the corresponding psychological mechanisms that inform these preferences in laboratory games? Empathy and Theory of Mind (ToM) are dispositions considered to be essential in social...

We investigate violations of consequentialism in the form of the stochastic dominance property. The property is shared by many theories of choice and implies that the decisionmaker prefers receiving the best outcome for sure over all lotteries that involve multiple outcomes. We run experiments...