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Which Emotion Should a Charity Employ to Nudge Donations?
Charities have different moral objectives. Some seek to promote welfare (e.g., Red Cross), but others seek to promote justice and equality (e.g., ACLU). We demonstrate how these different charities can employ specific positive emotions in their campaigns to nudge donations. Charities that seek to promote welfare should utilize compassion in their campaigns, but charities that seek to promote equality in society should utilize gratitude in their campaigns.
A Loss Is a Loss, Why Categorize It?
Consumers regularly track their expenses and assign them to categories like food, entertainment, and clothing, which is popularly known as mental accounting. Our research shows that consumption biases that result from mental accounting are not prevalent in Easterners due to their holistic thinking style, whereas Westerners exhibit such biases due to their analytic thinking style.
The Three Laws of Human Behavior
Human behavior is remarkably complicated. And yet, just as Newton's laws of motion distill three fundamental truths about the physical world, the three laws of human behavior describe three fundamental truths of human behavior: People tend to stick to the status quo unless the forces of friction or fuel push us them off their path; behavior is a function of the person and their environment; every decision includes tradeoffs and the potential for unintended consequences.
Why We Use Less Information Than We Think to Make Decisions
How much information do you need to make up your mind? Our research in various domains of decision making shows that we make decisions more quickly and based on less information than we think. This has important implications in an age in which information is plentiful.
Nudge Action: Overcoming Decision Inertia in Financial Planning Tools
Robo-advisors help investors deal with the complexity of the stock market. However, users of these new decision support systems are not immune to decision inertia – repeating supoptimal investment strategies regardless their negative financial consequences. I investigate two possible nudges to help user overcome decision inertia in robo-advisory environments.
Good for Some, Bad for Others: The Welfare Effects of Nudges
Nudges have become popular policy instruments, for good reasons. However, recent studies show they might sometimes backfire or cause undesired distributional effects – differing impacts across people. Such studies highlight the importance of careful policy analysis that examines both the average and distributional impacts of nudges.