Hypothetical bias is the common finding that hypothetical monetary values for “goods” are higher than real values. We extend this research to the domain of “bads” such as consumer and household choices made to avoid aversive outcomes (e.g., insurance). Previous evidence of hot-cold...

Many psychology experiments show that individually judged probabilities of the same event can vary depending on the partition of the state space (a framing effect called partition-dependence). We show that these biases transfer to competitive prediction markets in which multiple informed traders...

We report experiments on sender-receiver games with an incentive for senders to exaggerate. Subjects “overcommunicate” - messages are more informative of the true state than they should be, in equilibrium. Eyetracking shows that senders look at payoffs in a way that is consistent with a...

Curiosity has been described as the "wick in the candle of learning" but its underlying mechanisms are not well-understood. We scanned subjects with fMRI while they read trivia questions. The level of curiosity when reading questions is correlated with activity in caudate regions previously...

This paper describes a parametric approach to weakening rationality assumptions in game theory to fit empirical data better. The central features of game theory are: The concept of a game (players, strategies, information, timing, outcomes); strategic thinking; mutual consistency of beliefs and...

Self-employed workers provide useful evidence about the nature of flexible labor supply and possible reference-dependence. Many previous studies analyzed taxi cabdrivers. Newer rideshare platforms provide greater work hour flexibility and use surge pricing, making future marginal wages salient....

This paper examines the regulatory implications of behavioral economic insights. The central effect of behavioral economics in the legal literature to date has been to challenge the premise of formal economic theory that individuals understand their preferences and work to maximize these...