The concept of "luxury beliefs" has gained increasing attention in recent months. It captures the idea that, as status goods become more affordable, ideology has emerged as a new way to signal status. I use a signaling game to derive a prediction related to the concept: given some beliefs are...

We study how one person may shape the way another person interprets objective information. They do this by proposing a sense-making explanation (or narrative). Using a theory-driven experiment, we investigate the mechanics of such narrative persuasion. Our results reveal several insights. First,...

Aim/purpose - This study explores how the content feature and source of eWOM affect people's intentions and further analyses the effectiveness of eWOM on people's intention to watch movies. Design/methodology/approach - The study considers two dimensions of movie reviews, including the source...

The random utility model (RUM, McFadden and Richter (1990)) has been the standard tool to describe the behavior of a population of decision makers. RUM assumes that decision makers behave as if they maximize a rational preference over a choice set. This assumption may fail when consideration of...

Modern life offers nearly unbridled access to information; it is the harnessing of this information to guide decision-making that presents a challenge. We study how one individual may try to shape the way another person interprets objective information by proposing a causal explanation (or...

This paper studies how and why consumers respond to unexpected, transitory income shocks. In a randomized control trial, I elicit marginal propensities to consume (MPC) out of different hypothetical income shock scenarios, varying the payment mode, the shock size, and the source of income. The...

This paper studies responsibility attribution for outcomes of collusive bribery. In an experiment, participants labeled as either citizens or public officials can propose a bribery transaction to another participant (labeled as either public official or citizen, respectively), who decides...

We report the results of an experiment to systematically investigate the influence of different settings in credence good markets on opportunism in the sellers' decisions. We find that, as predicted by a cognitive dissonance model, the specific choice of the design features might be less...

Scientific evidence on the effect of sugar consumption on obesity has propelled policy makers in several states across the U.S. to propose the imposition of a tax on soft drinks sales. In this paper, we look at the effect of two tax events: a 5.5% sales tax on soft drinks imposed by the state of...

Questionnaires for adaptive choice-based conjoint analysis aim at minimizing some measure of the uncer- tainty associated with estimates of preference parameters (e.g. partworths). Bayesian approaches to conjoint analysis quantify this uncertainty with a multivariate distribution that is updated...