We study search behavior in a generalized "secretary problem" environment in which consumers search sequentially for the best alternative from a known and finite set of multi-attribute alternatives. In contrast to most previous studies, we make no distributional assumptions about the quality of...

Electronic recommendation agents have the potential to be valuable e-service tools in increasing consumer decision quality. Such agents are aimed at assisting consumers in the decision-making process and have the ability to enable consumers to make better choices for themselves. The definition...

In confidence theory, the decision maker relies on statistical regularities from the economic environment to adopt prior beliefs about the probabilities stated on a lottery. Following the confidence principle, by which the weight of the prior in Bayesian inference is proportional to the...

We study sequential search without priors. Our interest lies in decision rules that are close to being optimal under each prior and after each history. We call these rules robust. The search literature employs optimal rules based on cutoff strategies, and these rules are not robust. We derive...

We develop a forecasting method for the manufacturer and online seller of a product collection that changes periodically and radically. The firm, an industry leader in technology and quality, has experienced double-digit annual sales growth. In seeking to minimize supply-demand mismatch costs...

We experimentally investigate purchase decisions with linear and nonlinear pricing under risk. The experiment is based on a single period stochastic inventory problem with endogenous cost. It extends classic binary lottery experiments to test standard decision theoretic predictions concerning...

This paper analyzes the effect of information overload on preference or aversion for variety. According to the model, a rational decision maker who suffers from information overload, faces a two-stage decision process, and is choosing from a set of unknown goods will find it optimal at some...

We investigate whether depleting people's cognitive resources (or "willpower") affects the degree to which they are susceptible to framing effects. Recent research in social psychology and economics has suggested that willpower is a resource that can be temporarily depleted and that a depleted...

Recent health policy reforms try to increase consumer choice. We use a laboratory experiment to analyze consumers’ tastes in typical contract attributes of health insurances and to investigate their relationship with individual risk preferences. First, subjects make consecutive insurance...

Previous experimental results (Ballinger et al., 2003 and Carbone and Hey, 2004) have found that many agents fail to correctly take into account the length of the planning horizon also finding some support (See Carbone, 2006) for descriptive models, such as the Rolling Model. This paper presents...