A "Declaration of Reasonable Doubt" (Guardian, 9 September) is the latest reminder of the persistence of controversy over who wrote Shakespeare. But the skeptics' case depends on a logical slip. The starting point is always some close variant of the claim that while Shakspere (a common spelling...

I introduce the notion of "neglect defaulting", which labels the propensity to neglect possibilities which are ordinarily sensibly neglected. In familiar contexts we are well-tuned to recognize when to override the default. But outside the range of familiar experience – here in the artificial...

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...

Three experiments examine the effect of base rate consistency under direct experience. Base rate consistency was manipulated by blocking trials and setting base rate choice reinforcement to be either consistent or inconsistent across trial blocks. Experiment 1 shows that, contrary to the usual...

Designing a mechanism that provides a direct incentive for an individual to report her utility function over several alternatives is a difficult task. A framework for such mechanism design is the following: an individual (a decision maker) is faced with an optimization problem (e.g.,...

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 “take-the-bestâ€\x9D heuristic (TTB) and other simple strategies for choices between two outcomes...

The Wason card selection and the Tversky & Kahneman frame anomaly are examined in the context of a probabilistic, constructivist biological model of decision-making. Rational choice requires that decision-makers understand the meaning of the choices they confront. In fact, the determination of...