Participants in contingent valuation surveys and jurors setting punitive damages in civil trials provide answers denominated in dollars. These answers are better understood as expressions of attitudes than as indications of economic preferences. Well-established characteristics of attitudes and...

An experimental study of punitive damage awards in personal injury cases was conducted, using jury-eligible respondents. There was substantial consensus on judgments of the outrageousness of a defendant's actions and of the appropriate severity of punishment. Judgments of dollar awards made by...

A "building code" for preference measurement is needed in a world in which many expressions of preference are constructed when people are asked a valuation question. Construction of preferences means that preference measurement is best viewed as architecture (building a set of values) rather...

Evidence is presented to show that people are willing to pay a premium to avoid "bad deaths"--deaths that are especially dreaded, uncontrollable, involuntarily incurred, and inequitably distributed. Public judgments of this kind help explain the demand for regulation. But some of these judgments...

One of the characteristics of a free society should be a strong presumption in favor of full patient control over personal information. The presumption is rebutted when disclosure to others is necessary (1) for good patient care, as in the case of consultations and medical teams; (2) to compile...

Cost-benefit analysis is often justified on conventional economic grounds, as a way of preventing inefficiency. But it is most plausibly justified on cognitive grounds--as a way of counteracting predictable problems in individual and social cognition. Poor judgments, by individuals and...

When strong emotions are involved, people tend to focus on the badness of the outcome, rather than on the probability that the outcome will occur. The resulting "probability neglect" helps to explain excessive reactions to low-probability risks of catastrophe. Terrorists show a working knowledge...

Some 11 million participants in 401(k) plans invest more than 20 percent of their retirement savings in their employer's stock. Yet investing in the stock of one's employer is risky: single securities are riskier than diversified portfolios, and an employee's human capital typically is...