Consumers' budgets are influenced by the temporal frame used for the budget period. Budgets planned for the next month are much lower than recorded expenses, while those for the next year are closer to recorded expenses (study 1). The difficulty of estimating budgets for the next year imparts...

In one laboratory study and one field study conducted with a large, representative sample of respondents, we show that seemingly innocuous questions that precede a conjoint task, such as demographic and usage-related screening questions can alter the price sensitivities recovered fromthe main...

People differ in their beliefs about how and why the financial well-being of individuals changes over time. We find that these lay theories can be reliably described along three independent dimensions, respectively capturing the extent to which changes in financial well-being are perceived to...

In nine studies, we find that investors intuitively distinguish two independent dimensions of uncertainty: epistemic uncertainty that they attribute to missing knowledge, skill, or information, versus aleatory uncertainty that they attribute to chance or stochastic processes. Investors who view...

In four studies, we show that consumers' savings can be increased or decreased merely by changing the way consumers think about their saving goals. Consumers can (a) either specify or not specify an exact amount to save (goal specificity), and (b) they can focus on either how to save, or why to...

We argue that people intuitively distinguish epistemic (knowable) uncertainty from aleatory (random) uncertainty and show that the relative salience of these dimensions is reflected in natural language use. We hypothesize that confidence statements (e.g., “I am fairly confident,” “I am 90%...

People view uncertain events as knowable in principle (epistemic uncertainty), as fundamentally random (aleatory uncertainty), or as some mixture of the two. We show that people make more extreme probability judgments (i.e., closer to 0 or 1) for events they view as entailing more epistemic...

Several studies show that information used to screen alternatives becomes less important relative to information acquired latter in the search process simply because it was used to screen. Experiment 1 shows that the tendency to deemphasize prescreening information leads to systematically...

We find that exposure to different types of categories or assortments in a first task creates a mindset that changes how consumers process information. These mindsets in turn, have a spillover effect that alters consumers' decision making in a variety of subsequent and unrelated tasks, from...