Many situations involving search, such as commuters trying out new routes or organizations testing new procedures, can subject the explorer to the potential for subjective losses – situations that are worse than the status quo. How does the potential for experiencing losses during the course...

While the significance of narrative thinking has become increasingly recognized by economists, very little empirical research has documented its consequences for economically significant outcomes. We address this gap in one important domain: valuations. In two online experiments, participants...

This paper draws attention to a powerful human motive that has not yet been incorporated into economics: the desire to make sense of our immediate experience, our life, and our world. We propose that evolution has produced a ‘drive for sense-making' which motivates people to gather, attend to,...

We consider the determinants and consequences of a source of utility that has received limited attention from economists: people's desire for the beliefs of other people to align with their own. We relate this ‘preference for belief consonance' to a variety of other constructs that have been...

This paper investigates investor attention using novel panel data on daily online logins for a large sample of retirement accounts. We find support for selective attention to portfolio information. Account logins fall by 9.5% after market declines. Investors also pay less attention when the VIX...

We commonly think of information as a means to an end. However, a growing theoretical and experimental literature suggests that information may directly enter the agent's utility function. This can create an incentive to avoid information, even when it is useful, free, and independent of...

Advances in medical testing and widespread access to the internet have made it easier than ever to obtain information. Yet, when it comes to some of the most important decisions in life, people often choose to remain ignorant for a variety of psychological and economical reasons. We design and...

Using transaction data from a sample of 1.8 million credit card accounts, we provide the first field test of a major prediction of Prelec and Loewenstein's (1998) theory of mental accounting: that consumers will pay off expenditure on transient forms of consumption more quickly than expenditure...

This paper investigates investor attention using novel panel data on daily online logins for a large sample of retirement accounts. We find support for selective attention to portfolio information. Account logins fall by 9.5% after market declines. Investors also pay less attention when the VIX...