Economists have a great deal of influence on the legislative and judicial branches of government. This is good. But, the dominance of economics in Washington has led to the undervaluation of other social sciences. This paper explores the limitations of a traditional economics approach, the...

Bennis, Medin, and Bartels (2009) have contributed an interesting paper on the comparative benefit of moral rules versus cost-benefit analysis. Many of their specific comments are accurate, useful, and insightful. At the same time, we believe they have misrepresented cost-benefit analysis and...

How do decisions made for tomorrow or two days in the future differ from decisions made for several days in the future? We use data from an online grocer to address this question. In general, we find that as the delay between order completion and delivery increases, grocery customers spend less,...

In contrast to using controlled laboratory experiments, which offer a clear method for inferring cause-effect relationships, I will be using data from three personal stories to provide opinion and analysis. I will tell the three stories, which come from very different political institutions, in...

While traditional behavioral decision theory as applied to negotiation sheds light on some of the barriers encountered in negotiations, it does not fully account for many of the difficulties and failures to reach settlement in ideologically-based disputes. In this paper, we identify a number of...

Many perceive the predominantly command-and-control structure of regulatory policy to be overly restrictive and inefficient in achieving our emerging environmental goals. In response, the U.S. government has introduced several voluntary programs to develop innovative, beyond-compliance...

People routinely engage in dishonest acts without feeling guilty about their behavior. When and why does this occur? Across four studies, people justified their dishonest deeds through moral disengagement and exhibited motivated forgetting of information that might otherwise limit their...