People engage in self-promotional behavior because they want others to hold favorable images of them. Self-promotion, however, entails a tradeoff between conveying one’s positive attributes and being seen as bragging. We propose that people get this tradeoff wrong because they erroneously...

In 5 experiments we show that choices between bundles of consumption goods exhibit a preference for ‘order’ that cannot be explained on the basis of utility for consumption itself. The first 3 experiments show that this order-preference is strong and produces robust violations of normative...

Intuitively, people should cheat more when cheating is more lucrative, but we find that the effect of performance-based pay-rates on dishonesty depends on how readily people can compare their pay-rate to that of others. In Experiment 1, participants were paid 5 cents or 25 cents per...

Traditional economic and decision-making models allow for "free disposal" of information, meaning that more information will always make a decision maker (weakly) better off. This implies that those faced with decisions should always place non-negative value on information. Building on previous...

People tend to value objects more highly simply because they own them. Prior research indicates that people underestimate the impact of this endowment effect on both their own and other people's preferences. We show that underestimation of the endowment effect can lead to suboptimal behavior in...

This article, prepared for the forthcoming third edition of The Handbook of Emotion, surveys behavioral economic and neuroeconomic research on the influence of expected and immediate emotions on decision making under risk, intertemporal choice, and social preferences

Prior research has established that people's own physical attractiveness affects their selection of romantic partners. The current work provides further support for this effect and also examines a different yet related question: when less attractive people accept less attractive dates, do they...

Arguably, all judgments and decisions are made in 1 (or some combination) of 2 basic evaluation modes-joint evaluation mode (JE), in which multiple options are presented simultaneously and evaluated comparatively, or separate evaluation mode (SE), in which options are presented in isolation and...

Virtually all current theories of choice under risk or uncertainty are cognitive and consequentialist. They assume that people assess the desirability and likelihood of possible outcomes of choice alternatives and integrate this information through some type of expectation-based calculus to...

Consumers often behave differently than they would ideally like to behave. We propose that an anticipatory pain of paying drives tightwads to spend less than they would ideally like to spend. Spendthrifts, by contrast, experience too little pain of paying and typically spend more than they would...