The Endowment Effect and Beliefs About the Market.

The endowment effect occurs when people assign a higher value to an item they own than to the same item when they do not own it, and this effect is often taken to reflect an ownership-induced change in the intrinsic value people assign to the object. However recent evidence shows that valuations made by buyers and sellers are influenced by market prices provided for the individual products, suggesting a role for beliefs about the markets. Here we elicit individuals' beliefs about whole distributions of market prices, enabling us to quantify whether or not a given transaction constitutes a "good deal" and to demonstrate how an endowment effect may reflect such considerations.

Anonymized location data reveals trends in legal Cannabis use in communities with increased mental health risks at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has led to increases in felt negative affect for many. This is concerning as individuals at increased risk for mental health issues are often more likely to use substances to cope with stressors.

Objectives: The aim of the current study is to examine whether communities reporting an increased risk for developing mental health issues showed differential patterns of legal cannabis use as the pandemic began.

Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Unhealthy Eating in Populations with Obesity.

Objective: This study aimed to examine the impact of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic on patronage to unhealthy eating establishments in populations with obesity.

Methods: Anonymized movement data accounting for roughly 10% of devices in the United States at 138,989 unhealthy eating locations from December 1, 2019, through April 2020 and the percentage of adults with obesity, the poverty rate, and the food environment index in 65% of United States counties were collected and merged. A cluster corrected Poisson spline regression was performed predicting patronage by day, the percentage of adults with obesity in the establishment's county, the county's poverty rate, and its food environment index, as well as their interactions.

Choice rates are independent from perceived patterns (when patterns are not obvious): A reply to Plonsky and Teodorescu.

In Ashby, Konstantinidis, and Yechiam (2017) we argued that the variance in people's choices in decisions from experience stems from uncertainty about preferences. This was confirmed by high correlations between the variance in experiential choices and subsequent one-shot policy decisions: both showing considerable diversification. In the present paper we address a comment regarding our paper by Plonsky and Teodorescu (2020).

The effect of switching costs on choice-inertia and its consequences.

In two studies we provide a novel investigation into the effects of monetary switching costs on choice-inertia (i.e., selection of the same option on consecutive choices).

The consistency of visual attention to losses and loss sensitivity across valuation and choice.

Sensitivity to losses has been found to vary greatly across individuals. One explanation for this variability is that for some losses garner more visual attention and are subsequently given more weight in decision-making processes. In three studies we examined whether biases in visual attention toward potential losses during valuation and choice were related to loss sensitivity, as well as the valuations provided and the choices made.

The acute effect of Hypericum perforatum on short-term memory in healthy adults.

Rationale: Over-the-counter drugs containing Hypericum perforatum (H. perforatum) have been argued to improve memory and sustained attention. So far, these claims have not been supported in human studies.

Are we attracted by losses? Boundary conditions for the approach and avoidance effects of losses.

The majority of the literature on the psychology of gains and losses suggests that losses lead to an avoidance response. Several studies, however, have shown that losses can also lead to an approach response, whereby an option is selected more often when it produces losses. In five studies we examine the boundary conditions for these contradictory approach and avoidance effects.

On the relation between economic bubbles and effort gaps between sellers and buyers: An experimental study.

Economic bubbles are an empirical puzzle because they do not readily fit the notion of an efficient market. We argue that bubbles are associated with a conflict and a gap in the allocation of effort during negotiation by sellers and buyers. We examined 21 experimental asset markets where in one condition players could buy and sell and in the other they could either buy or sell.

Who's biased? A meta-analysis of buyer-seller differences in the pricing of lotteries.

A large body of empirical research has examined the impact of trading perspective on pricing of consumer products, with the typical finding being that selling prices exceed buying prices (i.e., the endowment effect).

Choice in experiential learning: True preferences or experimental artifacts?

The rate of selecting different options in the decisions-from-feedback paradigm is commonly used to measure preferences resulting from experiential learning. While convergence to a single option increases with experience, some variance in choice remains even when options are static and offer fixed rewards. Employing a decisions-from-feedback paradigm followed by a policy-setting task, we examined whether the observed variance in choice is driven by factors related to the paradigm itself: Continued exploration (e.

Finding the right fit: A comparison of process assumptions underlying popular drift-diffusion models.

Recent research makes increasing use of eye-tracking methodologies to generate and test process models. Overall, such research suggests that attention, generally indexed by fixations (gaze duration), plays a critical role in the construction of preference, although the methods used to support this supposition differ substantially. In 2 studies we empirically test prototypical versions of prominent processing assumptions against 1 another and several base models.

Forgetting the past: individual differences in recency in subjective valuations from experience.

Recent research investigating decisions from experience suggests that not all information is treated equally in the decision process, with more recently encountered information having a greater impact. We report 2 studies investigating how this differential treatment of sequentially encountered information affects subjective valuations of risky prospects when observations of past outcomes must be used to estimate the prospect's payoff distribution, and examine how individual differences in cognitive capacities influence information usage. In Study 1 we found that a sliding window of information model that averages a subset of (only) the most recently encountered outcomes (samples) fit the subjective valuation data for a portion of individuals better than models that integrate all observed outcomes.

Conscious and unconscious thought in risky choice: testing the capacity principle and the appropriate weighting principle of unconscious thought theory.

Daily we make decisions ranging from the mundane to the seemingly pivotal that shape our lives. Assuming rationality, all relevant information about one's options should be thoroughly examined in order to make the best choice. However, some findings suggest that under specific circumstances thinking too much has disadvantageous effects on decision quality and that it might be best to let the unconscious do the busy work.