Institutions for collective decision making often defer to the status quo, granting it a privileged position relative to proposed policy innovations. The possible benefits of status quo deference must be weighed against a cost: status quo deference can prevent a society from learning the merits...

Public policy advocates routinely assert that “research has shown” a particular policy to be desirable. But how reliable is the analysis in the research they invoke? And how does that analysis affect the way policy is made, on issues ranging from vaccination to minimum wage to FDA drug...

Economists studying choice with partial knowledge typically assume that the decision maker places a subjective distribution on unknown quantities and maximizes expected utility. Someone lacking a subjective distribution faces a problem of choice under ambiguity. This article reviews recent...

When choice data are not available, researchers studying preferences sometimes ask respondents to state the actions they would choose in choice scenarios. Data on stated choices are then used to estimate random utility models, as if they are data on actual choices. Stated and actual choices may...

This article shows how to predict counterfactual discrete choice behavior when the presumed behavioral model partially identifies choice probabilities. The simple, general approach uses observable choice probabilities to partially infer the distribution of types in the population and then...