People differ in their beliefs about how and why the financial well-being of individuals changes over time. We find that these lay theories can be reliably described along three independent dimensions, respectively capturing the extent to which changes in financial well-being are perceived to...

In nine studies, we find that investors intuitively distinguish two independent dimensions of uncertainty: epistemic uncertainty that they attribute to missing knowledge, skill, or information, versus aleatory uncertainty that they attribute to chance or stochastic processes. Investors who view...

In one laboratory study and one field study conducted with a large, representative sample of respondents, we show that seemingly innocuous questions that precede a conjoint task, such as demographic and usage-related screening questions can alter the price sensitivities recovered fromthe main...

Several studies show that information used to screen alternatives becomes less important relative to information acquired latter in the search process simply because it was used to screen. Experiment 1 shows that the tendency to deemphasize prescreening information leads to systematically...