Continue reading »]]> On May 7th and 8th, Columbia University will hold an invitation-only Choice Architecture Workshop, designed to talk about nudges that go beyond simple defaults and also explore potential applications.  I’m looking forward to hearing many interesting talks, especially those from Cass Sunstein, Eric Johnson, Dan Goldstein. Together with Christoph Ungemach, I will be giving a talk the afternoon of the 8th called “Customizing Choice Architecture using Signposts”.

 On May 9th and 10th, the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions will hold its annual meeting. I’m looking forward to hearing many interesting talks, especially those from Elke Weber, David Hardisty, Michel Handgraaf. I will be giving a talk the afternoon of the 9th called “Environmental Consumer Labels: Scale effects”.

Continue reading »]]> I will be presenting two talks at the Marketing & Public Policy Conference 2013, which is being held in downtown Washington DC between May 30th and June 1st.

The first presentation  - Translated Attributes as a Choice Architecture Tool: Trick & Treat - will be part of the session “004. Consumer Responses to How Product Attributes are Communicated” on Friday May 31st between 8:30am and 10:00 am.

The second presentation  - Scale & Metric Design as Choice Architecture Tools - will be part of the session “005. The Impact of Pro-Environmental Marketing on Consumer Preferences” also on Friday May 31st between 10:30am and 12:00 pm. 

Continue reading »]]> Together with Dr. Anna McCarrey, I will be presenting a poster called “The description-experience choice gap is attenuated in older adults” at the 25th APS Annual Convention, May 23-26, 2013 at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park in Washington, D.C., USA.

You’ll be able to find us at:

• Poster Session XV
• 5/26/2013; 10:00 AM-11:00 AM
• APS Exhibit Hall A
• Board Number 39

The short abstract for the submission is: Preferences tend to vary depending on whether outcomes and probabilities are explicitly stated or are learned from repeated sampling. We found that this description-experience “choice gap” was apparent for younger adults but not for older adults. We interpret the data in terms of the frontal aging hypothesis and positivity bias.

Continue reading »]]> I will be heading to Sydney in the final week of February and will give a number of repeated talks summarizing the work that I have been part of related to the effect of presenting translated attributes on choice.

You can catch me at any of the following:

1. 2013/02/25: University of Technology, Sydney (marketing group):
   • 2:30pm-4:00pm; Seminar Room, Level 3; 645 Harris Street, Ultimo.
2. 2013/02/26, University of New South Wales (marketing group):
   • 12:00pm-1:30pm.
3. 2013/02/26, University of New South Wales (psychology group):
   • 4:00pm-5:00pm; Matthews Building 310.
4. 2013/02/28 - University of Sydney (marketing group):
   • 2:30pm-4:00pm; Room 214/215, Economics and Business Building (H69) .
5. 2013/03/01 – University of Sydney (psychology group):

• 4:00pm-5:00pm; Education 424

Talk Abstract: The attributes of alternative choice options can be described in different ways. For example, vehicle fuel economy can be expressed as fuel consumption, the cost of fuel, or carbon emitted. Moreover, each translation can be expressed on a contracted scale such as “per week” or an expanded scale such as “per year”. We ran two sets of online studies in which participants chose between vehicles that differed in their tradeoff between price and fuel economy. The experiments manipulated the number and type of translated attributes expressing these two global dimensions. In one set of online experiments, we found that the presentation of these translated attributes in isolation influenced people’s choices in predicable ways. In a second set of online experiments, we found that the presentation of these same translated attributes in combination also influenced people’s choices in predicable ways. We attribute these effects to a number of psychological phenomena including metric compatibility, anchoring, goal activation, and use of a counting heuristic. The usefulness of translated attributes as a choice architecture tool that can facilitate informed consumer choices is discussed.

Continue reading »]]> It has been nearly 2 years since Ben Newell and I started working this paper, and we are now very pleased to have received the news that it will be published in Cognition later this year. The paper is titled: “Does the description-experience gap occur in the long run?”.

I will post the paper on the publications page when the proofs are done. In the meantime, here is the abstract:

“Previous research has shown that many choice biases are attenuated when short-run decisions are reframed to the long run. However, this literature has been limited to description-based choice tasks in which possible outcomes and their probabilities are explicitly specified. A recent literature has emerged showing that many core findings found using the description paradigm do not generalized to experience-based choice tasks in which possible outcomes and their probabilities are learned from sequential sampling. In the current study, we investigated whether this description-experience choice gap occurs in the long run. We examined description- and experience-based preferences under two traditional short run framed choice tasks (single-play, repeated-play) and also a long-run frame (multi-play). We found a reduction in the size of the description-experience gap in the long-run frame, which was attributable to greater choice maximizing in the description format and reduced overweighting of rare events in the experience format. We interpret these results as a “broad bracketing” effect: the long-run mindset attenuates short-run biases such as loss aversion and reliance on small samples.”

Continue reading »]]> Quite a successul haul this year! Three projects I am working on have been accepted as talks at this year’s SJDM annual meeting:

• With Ben Newell: Does the description-experience gap occur in the long run?
• With Rick Larrick: Metric and scale design as choice architecture tools.
• With Christoph Ungemach, Eric Johnson, Elke Weber, Rick Larrick: Redundant attributes: Trick or treat?

Continue reading »]]> A chapter about the description-experience gap written with Ben Newell was accepted to be published in a new Progress in Brain Research book due out next year. This is a great summary of our perspective on the field, which we have developed over the last 5 years.

I will post the chapter up on the publications page when the proofs come in. In the meantime, here is the abstract:

“The description-experience “gap” refers to the observation that choices are influenced by whether information about potential alternatives is learnt from a summary description or from the experience of sequentially sampling outcomes. In this chapter, we traverse the cognitive steps required to make a decision – information acquisition, storage, representation, and then choice – and at each step briefly review the evidence for sources of discrepancy between these two formats of choice. We conclude that description- and experience-based choice formats lie along a continuum of uncertainty and share important core features, including the explicit representation of probability, the combining of this probability information with outcome information, and utility maximization. The implication of this conclusion is that the differences between description- and experience-based choices emerge from how uncertainty information is acquired, rather than how it is represented or used.”