Would people report a different valuation for a 50 dollars Amazon gift card that is certain to be available, and for the same gift card that has a 10% chance of being available? In violation of expected utility theory, we show that people anticipate less utility from uncertain outcomes than from certain outcomes, even conditional on their realization. We show that it isn’t driven by beliefs about the quality the good (we always use gift cards, which are of unambiguous quality), by a misunderstanding of the instructions, or by differences in “weirdness“ (Mislavsky and Simonsohn 2018) between the transactions.

Should I search for a cheaper flight? How much should I bid for the house? To answer those questions, consumers form beliefs about the dispersion of flight prices or house bids… but how accurate are those beliefs? We provide evidence for a phenomenon we call dispersion spillover: Seeing more (vs. less) dispersed prices in one category leads people to perceive more price dispersion in another category. This dispersion spillover influences consumers’ judgments of price attractiveness and changes their likelihood to search for (and find) better options.

How should researchers exclude outliers: Across the data, or within conditions? In this paper, I show that when outlier exclusions are performed in a way that is not ‘blind’ to the researchers’ hypothesis (e.g., within conditions), they increase Type I error to unacceptable levels.

Can loss aversion disappear and reverse? In this article, we show that the shifts in loss aversion reported in Walasek and Stewart (2015) are driven by an invalid experimental paradigm. After correcting this error, we do not see evidence that loss aversion is shaped by the distribution of gains and losses that people have encountered.

Consumers intuitively categorize front-of-packaging claims displayed on food into 4 broad categories: (1) Claims about “removing negatives,” (2) claims about “adding positives,” (3) claims about “not adding negatives,” and (4) claims about “not removing positives.” Each type of claim is associated with different beliefs about the healthiness, tastiness, and dieting properties of the food.