Many economically important settings, from financial markets to consumer choice, involve dynamic decisions under risk. People are willing to accept risk as part of a sequence of choices---even when it is fair or has a negative expected value---while at the same time rejecting positive-expected...

We model the dynamics of discrimination and show how its evolution can identify the underlying cause. We test these theoretical predictions in a field experiment on a large online platform where users post content that is evaluated by other users on the platform. We assign posts to accounts that...

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...

Discrimination has been widely studied in the social sciences. Economists often categorize the source of discrimination as either taste-based or statistical—a valuable distinction for policy design and welfare analysis. In this paper, we highlight that in many situations economic agents may...

We study the role of heuristic versus deliberative processing in intertemporal choice. Using studies in the Democratic Republic of Congo and an online labor market, we show that waiting periods –designed to prompt deliberation by temporally separating news about choice sets from choices...

We show that constraints can improve financial decision-making by disciplining behavioral biases. In financial markets, restrictions on leverage limit traders' ability to borrow to open new positions. We demonstrate that regulation which restricts the provision of leverage to retail traders...

Understanding how prior outcomes affect risk attitudes is critical for the study of choice under uncertainty. A large literature documents the influence of prior losses on subsequent risk attitudes. The findings appear contradictory: some studies find that people become more risk seeking after a...

The extent to which individuals discount the future and whether they discount in a time-consistent fashion is an important determinant of their life outcomes. Using a field experiment in the Democratic Republic of Congo, we show that direct exposure to violence substantially increases present...

There is growing interest in the use of loss contracts that offer performance incentives as upfront payments that employees can lose. Standard behavioral models predict a tradeoff in the use of loss contracts: employees will work harder under loss contracts than under gain contracts; but,...