When the assignment of incentives is uncertain, we study how the regularity and frequency of rewards and risk attitudes influence participation and effort. We contrast three incentive schemes in a real-effort experiment in which individuals decide when to quit: a continuous incentive scheme and...

An important problem faced by boundedly rational agents is to identify 'regions of rationality,' i.e., the areas for which simple, boundedly rational models are and are not effective. To map the contours of such regions, we derive probabilities that models identify the best of m alternatives (m ...

We constructed triopolistic experimental markets where producers set prices. One producer's costs were higher than the others. In two experiments, costs were attributed to compliance with ethical guidelines. In the third, no justification was provided. Consumers paid premia for the ethically...

Several factors affect attitudes toward ambiguity. What happens, however, when people are asked to exchange an ambiguous alternative in their possession for an unambiguous one? We present three experiments in which individuals preferred to retain the former. This status quo bias emerged both...

The demands of representative design, as formulated by Egon Brunswik (1956), set a high methodological standard. Both experimental participants and the situations with which they are faced should be representative of the populations to which researchers claim to generalize results. Failure to...

When can a single variable be more accurate in binary choice than multiple sources of information? We derive, analytically, the probability that a single variable (SV) will correctly predict one of two choices when both criterion and predictor are continuous variables. We further provide...

People experience difficulty in facing tradeoffs in multi-attribute choice. However, to what extent do they need to face these tradeoffs explicitly? We examine choices by simple tradeoff - avoiding models in environments where "true" preferences are linear and attributes are characterized by...

The effectiveness of decision rules depends on characteristics of both rules and environments. A theoretical analysis of environments specifies the relative predictive accuracies of the lexicographic rule "take-the-best" (TTB) and other simple strategies for binary choice. We identify three...

We study the gender gap in a competitive environment by exploiting the “naturalistic experiment” of a TV game show with self-selected participants and no gender-specific constraints nor discrimination. Games consist of multiple rounds where contestants answer general knowledge questions...

Confidence in decision making is an important dimension of managerial behavior. However, what is the relation between confidence and feedback on decisions? To explore this and related issues, use was made of the ESM (Experience Sampling Method) to sample decisions taken by students and business...