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The Disgust-Promotes-Disposal Effect
(Springer, 2012)
Individuals tend toward status quo bias: preferring existing options over
new ones. There is a countervailing phenomenon: Humans naturally dispose of
objects that disgust them, such as foul-smelling food. But what if the ...
The Methodology of Positive Policy Analysis
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2010)
Policy analyses frequently clash. Their disagreements stem from many sources, such as models, empirical estimates, values, who should have standing, and weighting of different criteria. We provide a simple taxonomy of ...
Variable Temptations and Black Mark Reputations
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2011)
In a world of imperfect information, reputations often guide the sequential decisions to trust and to reward trust. We consider two-player situations, where one player – the truster – decides whether to trust, and the other ...
Addressing Catastrophic Risks: Disparate Anatomies Require Tailored Therapies
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2011)
Catastrophic risks differ in terms of their natural or human origins, their possible amplification by human behaviors, and the relationships between those who create the risks and those who suffer the losses. Given their ...
The Dopamine Receptor D4 Gene (DRD4) and Self-Reported Risk Taking in the Economic Domain
(John F. Kennedy School for Government, Harvard University, 2011)
Background: Recent evidence suggests that individual variation in risk taking is partly due to genetic factors. Methodology/Principal Findings: We explore how self-reported risk taking in different domains correlates with ...
The "CAPS" Prediction System and Stock Market Returns
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2011)
We study the predictive power of approximately 2.5 million stock picks submitted by individual users to the “CAPS” website run by the Motley Fool company (www.caps.fool.com). These picks prove to be surprisingly informative ...
Shunning Uncertainty: The Neglect of Learning Opportunities
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University., 2011)
Financial, managerial, and medical decisions often involve alternatives whose possible outcomes have uncertain probabilities. In contrast to alternatives whose probabilities are known, these uncertain alternatives offer ...
The Behavior of Savings and Asset Prices When Preferences and Beliefs are Heterogeneous
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2011)
Movements in asset prices are a major risk confronting individuals. This paper establishes new asset pricing results when agents differ in risk preference, time preference and/or expectations. It shows that risk tolerance ...
Disgust Promotes Disposal: Souring the Status Quo
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard Uinversiy, 2010)
Humans naturally dispose of objects that disgust them. Is this phenomenon so deeply embedded that even incidental disgust – i.e., where the source of disgust is unrelated to a possessed object – triggers disposal? Two ...
The Online Laboratory: Conducting Experiments in a Real Labor Market
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2010)
Online labor markets have great potential as platforms for conducting experiments, as they provide immediate access to a large and diverse subject pool and allow researchers to conduct randomized controlled trials. We argue ...