We draw out implications of the identifiable victim effect - the greater sympathy shown toward identifiable than statistical victims - for public finance. We first review research showing (1) that people respond more strongly to identifiable than statistical victims even when identification...

Comparisons with counterfactual outcomes can influence choices in sequential decisions. We examine the effect of anticipated regret, and social takeover - the knowledge that someone else might take one's place - on persistence on an investment task. Some participants received feedback about what...

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...

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...

None of the tasks used to induce boredom have undergone rigorous psychometric validation, which creates potential problems for operational equivalence, comparisons across studies, statistical power, and confounding results. This methodological concern was addressed by testing and comparing the...

We apply a novel crowdsourcing approach to provide rapid insights on the most promising interventions to promote uptake of COVID-19 booster vaccines. In the first stage, international experts proposed 46 unique interventions. To reduce noise and potential bias, in the second stage, experts and...

People exploit flexibility in mental accounting to relax psychological constraints on spending. Four studies demonstrate this in the context of moral behavior. The first study replicates prior findings that people donate more money to charity when they earned it through unethical versus ethical...

We develop a model of fragile self-esteem — self-esteem that is vulnerable to objectively unjustified swings — and study its implications for choices that depend on, or are aimed to protect, one's self-view. We assume that a person's self-esteem is determined by sampling from his store of...

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...

The working paper is available at 'http://ssrn.com/abstract=2417383' http://ssrn.com/abstract=2417383.Presenting a default option is known to influence important decisions. That includes decisions regarding advance medical directives, documents people prepare to convey which medical treatments...