The disposition effect is the reluctance to sell assets at a loss relative to a salient point of reference, typically assumed to be the purchase price. Using data on stocks and housing sales, we show that the peak price achieved by an asset during the investor's period of holding constitutes an...

As Herbert Simon foresaw in the early stages of what has come to be known as the information age, a widespread abundance of information has made limited attention an increasingly pivotal constraint on economic activity, to the degree that attention is now the primary factor of production...

We study the effects of annuitization compared to spending down a lump-sum on consumption and subjective wellbeing. Analyzing longitudinal data on UK retirees before and after the pension reform that provided greater freedom to draw down savings, we find that annuitization increased retirees’...

New technologies increase opportunities and pressures to learn new skills. Research on "desirable difficulties" has shown, however, that learners are often poor judges of the strategies for learning - e.g., they fail to appreciate that spacing experiences with a task out over time will enhance...

In an effort to address persistent consumer privacy concerns, policy makers and the data industry seem to have found common grounds in proposals that aim at making online privacy more “transparent.” Such self-regulatory approaches rely on, among other things, providing more and better...

Contrary to the assumption in much social science research that people have stable, coherent, preferences with respect to privacy, we find that concern about privacy, measured by divulgence of private information, is highly sensitive to contextual factors. We report results from 3 experiments,...

Workers in a wide variety of jobs are paid based on performance, which is commonly seen as enhancing effort and productivity relative to non-contingent pay schemes. However, psychological research suggests that excessive rewards can, in some cases, result in a decline in performance. To test...

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...