In economic analyses of asymmetric information, better-informed agents are assumed capable of reproducing the judgments of less-informed agents. The authors discuss a systematic violation of this assumption that they call the "curse of knowledge." Better-informed agents are unable to ignore...

We examine the impact of relative wages on labor supply in a laboratory experiment. We test the hypothesis that, ceteris paribus, making a given wage high (low) relative to other wage levels will lead to an increase (decrease) in labor supply. We find that labor supply does respond significantly...

The transplant system has been criticized for not paying enough attention to efficiency in distributing scarce organs. But little research has been done to see how the general public views tradeoffs between efficiency and equity. We surveyed members of the general public to see how they would...

George Loewenstein is one of the pioneers of the rapidly growing field of behavioral economics. For over twenty years he has been working at the intersection of economics and psychology and is one of the few people of whom it can be said that their work is equally respected and well known within...

Is variety of the spice of life? The present research suggests that the answer depends on the rate of consumption. In three experiments, we find that, whereas a variety of stimuli is preferred to repetition of even a better-liked single stimulus when consumption is continuous, this preference...

We review evidence from our published and ongoing research that disclosing conflicts of interest has unintended consequences, helping conflicted advisors and harming their advisees: With disclosure, advisors feel comfortable giving more biased advice, but advisees do not properly adjust for this...

This paper considers a number of parallels between risky and intertemporal choice. We begin by demonstrating a one-to-one correspondence between the behavioral violations of the respective normative theories for the two domains (i.e., expected utility and discounted utility models). We argue...

For products that require skills to use, such as computers, cell phones, and sports equipment, consumers’ purchase and usage decisions often depend on their prediction of the speed with which they will master the relevant skills. In this article, we identify a systematic pessimism in...

New marketing paradigms that exploit the capabilities for data collection, aggregation, and dissemination introduced by the Internet provide benefits to consumers but also pose real or perceived privacy hazards. In four experiments, we seek to understand consumer decisions to reveal or withhold...