This high-stakes experiment investigates the effect on buyers of mandatory disclosures concerning an insurance policy's value for money (the claims ratio) and the seller's commission. These information disclosures have virtually no effect despite most buyers claiming to value such information....

This paper uses a laboratory experiment to analyze the impact of different types of information on consumption and savings behavior. Based on a buffer stock savings model, three treatment dimensions are used: The amount of information subjects receive about the likelihood of income shocks,...

This paper studies how people make inference about a state of the world when the information structure includes additional, payoff-irrelevant states. For example, learning about effort from observed performance may require accounting for the otherwise irrelevant role of luck. This creates an...

In an experiment on markets for services, we find that consumers are likely to stick to defaults and achieve suboptimal outcomes. We unpack two key psychological reasons why they do this - complexity (in terms of non-linearity, number and bundling of tariffs) and consumer inattention. The...

Multi-part tariffs are widely favored within service industries as an efficient means of mapping prices to differential levels of consumer demand. Whether they benefit consumers, however, is far less clear as they pose individuals with a potentially difficult task of dynamically allocating usage...

We designed an experiment that examines how knowledge about the price of a good, and the time at which the information is received, affects how the good is experienced. The good in question was wine, and the price was either high or low. Our results suggest that hosts offering wine to guests can...

Economists, psychologists, and marketing researchers rely on measures of consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) in estimating demand for private and public goods and in designing optimal price schedules. Existing market research techniques for measuring WTP differ in whether they provide an...

Many consumer products today present information regarding an environmental attribute (e.g., recycled content). This information can be expected to augment the other attributes, resulting in an overall increased interest in the product. However, previous research on preferences for environmental...