A single night of sleep deprivation (SD) evoked a strategy shift during risky decision making such that healthy human volunteers moved from defending against losses to seeking increased gains. This change in economic preferences was correlated with the magnitude of an SD-driven increase in...

Adaptive decision making in real-world contexts often relies on strategic simplifications of decision problems. Yet, the neural mechanisms that shape these strategies and their implementation remain largely unknown. Using an economic decision-making task, we dissociate brain regions that predict...

Expectations about how long one will live are essential for making informed choices about many important personal decisions. We propose that beliefs (expectations) about longevity are a response constructed at the time of judgment, subject to irrelevant task and context factors, and leading to...

Using 14,800 forecasts of one-year S&P 500 returns made by Chief Financial Officers over a 12-year period, we track the individual executives who provide multiple forecasts to study how their beliefs evolve dynamically. While CFOs’ return forecasts are systematically unbiased, their confidence...

For many Americans the question of when to claim Social Security benefits is one of the most consequential financial decisions they will ever face. While acknowledging that individuals differ in terms of optimal timing for starting Social Security benefits, many economists argue that an average...

A viewpoint that has recently emerged in decision research is that preferences for objects of any complexity are often constructed - not merely revealed - in generating a response to a judgment or choice task. This paper reviews a program of research that traces the constructiveness of...

In several marketing contexts, strategic complementarity between the actions of individual players demands that players coordinate their decisions to reach efficient outcomes. Yet coordination failure is a common occurrence. We show that the well-established psychological phenomenon of...

Among alternative regulatory responses, information provision programs are receiving increasing attention despite the decidedly mixed evidence about their effectiveness. This paper provides detailed experimental evidence to demonstrate that for one important example of an information program,...