This high-stakes experiment investigates the effect on buyers of mandatory disclosures concerning an insurance policy's value for money (the claims ratio) and the seller's commission. These information disclosures have virtually no effect despite most buyers claiming to value such information....

This paper studies how people make inference about a state of the world when the information structure includes additional, payoff-irrelevant states. For example, learning about effort from observed performance may require accounting for the otherwise irrelevant role of luck. This creates an...

In an experiment on markets for services, we find that consumers are likely to stick to defaults and achieve suboptimal outcomes. We unpack two key psychological reasons why they do this - complexity (in terms of non-linearity, number and bundling of tariffs) and consumer inattention. The...

This paper uses a laboratory experiment to analyze the impact of different types of information on consumption and savings behavior. Based on a buffer stock savings model, three treatment dimensions are used: The amount of information subjects receive about the likelihood of income shocks,...

Multi-part tariffs are widely favored within service industries as an efficient means of mapping prices to differential levels of consumer demand. Whether they benefit consumers, however, is far less clear as they pose individuals with a potentially difficult task of dynamically allocating usage...

Mere observation of others' choices can be informative about product quality. This paper develops an individual-level dynamic model of observational learning, and applies it to a novel data set from the U.S. kidney market where transplant candidates on a waiting list sequentially decide whether...

This paper analyzes the effect of information overload on preference or aversion for variety. According to the model, a rational decision maker who suffers from information overload, faces a two-stage decision process, and is choosing from a set of unknown goods will find it optimal at some...

This paper examines the influence of external information on their purchase behaviour of GM food. Data are gathered from auction experiments. The results show that external information affects the purchase behaviour of consumers. Participants who receive single negative information from...