How Does Background Music Affect Dining Duration, Tips and Bill Amounts in Restaurants? A Field Experiment.

Influences from external factors can affect decision-makers, preventing them from making decisions in a fully rational manner. Music may serve as one such influential factor in this context. Music is part of our daily lives, and we are exposed to music in numerous places.

Searching for momentum in NBA triplets of free throws.

The literature on momentum is still undecided, with mixed results whether momentum exists or is only perceived to exist ("hot hand fallacy"). We explore whether momentum exists by looking at cases in which a basketball player has three consecutive free throws. A free throw is a well-defined task executed in a stable environment, allegedly giving momentum optimal chances to occur.

Gender differences in the effect of employee-manager friendships on salary dynamics in CPA firms.

We study the effect of employee-manager relations on salary increases. We use data obtained from a longitudinal survey, carried out among auditing team members in leading Israeli CPA firms (which are subsidiaries of American firms). Our main findings suggest that the degree of friendship with the team manager is positively correlated with the rate of the salary increase, particularly among female workers whose team manager is also a female.

Searching for Judgment Biases Among Elite Basketball Referees.

An attacking basketball player initiating significant physical contact with a defender who has already established a legal and stationary position, should be called with an offensive foul. Offensive foul situations are particularly ambiguous and complex, making the referee's task a difficult one. In such conditions of complexity and constraints of time, the referee is likely to be prone to systematic biases, as has been documented by previous research in other sport settings.

At Least I Tried: The Relationship between Regulatory Focus and Regret Following Action vs. Inaction.

Regret is an unpleasant feeling that may arise following decisions that ended poorly, and may affect the decision-maker's well-being and future decision making. Some studies show that a decision to act leads to greater regret than a decision not to act when both resulted in failure, because the latter is usually the norm. In some cases, when the norm is to act, this pattern is reversed.

A linear city model with asymmetric consumer distribution.

The article analyzes a linear-city model where the consumer distribution can be asymmetric, which is important because in real markets this distribution is often asymmetric. The model yields equilibrium price differences, even though the firms' costs are equal and their locations are symmetric (at the two endpoints of the city). The equilibrium price difference is proportional to the transportation cost parameter and does not depend on the good's cost.

Beliefs and social behavior in a multi-period ultimatum game.

We conduct a multi-period ultimatum game in which we elicit players' beliefs. Responders do not predict accurately the amount that will be offered to them, and do not get better in their predictions over time. At the individual level we see some effect of the mistake in expectations in the previous period on the responder's expectation about the offer in the current period, but this effect is relatively small.

(Ir)rationality in action: do soccer players and goalkeepers fail to learn how to best perform during a penalty kick?

This chapter discusses penalty kicks in soccer, interpreted within the framework of behavioral economics. We present two behaviors of professional soccer players during penalty kicks that seem nonoptimal, and possibly indicate biases in decision making. We ask whether, despite the huge incentives involved in professional soccer and the possibility of learning through feedback from the outcomes of previous penalty kicks, goalkeepers and penalty kickers are not optimizing their actions.