Daniel Read

Warwick Business School

Background: This study explores the potential for behavioural economics techniques called 'nudges' to encourage the use of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) by overseas-born men who have sex with men (MSM) in Australia. We investigated the preferences of overseas-born MSM for different nudges and the effect of nudges on reported likelihood of se...

Background: Additional approaches to HIV prevention and management, such as Nudgeathons, are required to increase access to HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) among overseas-born men who have sex with men (MSM). Methods: In September 2021, we conducted a 4-h online Nudgeathon, wherein four teams co-designed behaviourally informed adverts to imp...

BACKGROUND There is consistent evidence that non-adherence is a significant problem associated with worse clinical outcomes, higher downstream re-hospitalization rates and a higher use of resources. A potential innovative strategy that has been found successful at improving patient medication adherence is the use of gamification. OBJECTIVE The stu...

Background: This study explores the potential for behavioural economics techniques called 'nudges' to encourage the use of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) by overseas-born men who have sex with men (MSM) in Australia. We investigated the preferences of overseas-born MSM for different nudges and the effect of nudges on reported likelihood of se...

Purpose of Review This scoping review summarises the literature on HIV prevention and management interventions utilizing behavioural economic principles encapsulated in the MINDSPACE framework. Recent Findings MINDSPACE is an acronym developed by the UK’s behavioural insights team to summarise nine key influences on human behaviour: Messenger, Inc...

Behavioral economics and its applied branch “nudging” can improve individual choices in various health care settings. However, there is a paucity of research using nudges to improve regular testing for HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs). The study examined which reminder system and message type men who have sex with men (MSM) pref...

We introduce the Preference for Earlier versus Later Income (PELI) scale, measuring patience for over 50,000 individuals from 65 countries. We focus on the relationship between age and income on patience, two variables that have been widely studied in isolation. We find that, within countries, individuals in the richest income quintile are equally...

The persuasive potential for varying messenger types and feedback frames to increase pro-environmental choice was explored in a 2 (feedback frame: financial vs. environmental) × 5 (messenger type: neighbour, government, industry, utilities vs. control) factorial design experiment. Using the context of home heating choice, 493 non-student participan...

The current research applies decision-making theory to the problem of increasing uptake of energy-efficient technologies, where uptake is currently slower than one might predict following rational choice models. We explore the role of alignability effects on consumers' preference for standard versus energy-efficient technologies. Previous research...

Zero outcomes are inconsequential in most models of choice. However, when disclosing zero outcomes they must be designated. It has been shown that a gamble is judged to be more attractive when its zero outcome is designated as “losing $0” rather than “winning $0,” an instance of what we refer to as the mutable-zero effect. Drawing on norm theory, w...

The potential of normative and feedback (financial vs. environmental) information in guiding pro-environmental decision-making behaviour was explored in a 2 × 2 (plus control) choice experiment. Using the context of home heating, 599 non-student participants from the UK general public were asked to choose between a standard heating system (a gas bo...

Is the inferred preference of a deceased relative to donate his or her organs stronger when the choice was made under a mandated rather than under an automatic default (i.e., nudged choice) legislative system? The answer to this is particularly important, because families can, and do, veto the choices of their deceased relatives. In three studies,...

Human adults often show a preference for scarce over abundant goods. In this paper, we investigate whether this preference was shared by 4‐ and 6‐year‐old children as well as chimpanzees, humans’ nearest primate relative. Neither chimpanzees nor 4‐year‐olds displayed a scarcity preference, but 6‐year‐olds did, especially in the presence of competit...

This chapter first provides a brief account of the economic model of intertemporal choice, as it applies to individual decision-makers. Next, it considers some key behavioural departures from this model and, in particular, how to interpret these departures. The chapter also considers what people are actually doing when they make choices in the labo...

We design an experiment to test the hypothesis that, in violation of Bayes’ rule, some people respond more forcefully to the strength of information than to its weight. We provide incentives to motivate effort, use naturally occurring information, and control for risk attitude. We find that the strength–weight bias affects expectations but that its...

This paper proposes a novel account of impatience: People pay more attention to the opportunity costs of choosing larger, later rewards than to the opportunity costs of choosing smaller, sooner ones. Eight studies show that when the opportunity costs of choosing smaller, sooner rewards are subtly highlighted, people become more patient, whereas whe...

We examine preferences for sequences of delayed monetary gains. In the experimental literature, two prominent models have been advanced as psychological descriptions of preferences for sequences. In one model, the instantaneous utilities of the outcomes in a sequence are discounted as a function of their delays, and assembled into a discounted util...

Unimodal intertemporal decisions involve comparing options of the same type (e.g., apples now versus apples later), and cross-modal decisions involve comparing options of different types (e.g., a car now versus a vacation later). As we show, existing models of intertemporal choice do not allow time preference to depend on whether the comparisons to...

Many decision makers seek to optimize choices between uncertain options such as strategies, employees, or products. When performance targets must be met, attending to observed past performance is not enough to optimize choices—option uncertainty must also be considered. For example, for stretch targets that exceed observed performance, more uncerta...

We use the method of policy capturing to address three open questions regarding how people judge the fairness of events. First, do people differ in how they judge whether a situation is fair or unfair; second, are fairness judgments stable within-person; and, third, how much insight do people have into how they make fairness judgments? To investiga...

Individuals make plans about their future behaviour, which spell out what choices they intend to make in the future. Applications include decisions about what to eat, how to spend your weekends, and when to get your work done. However, prior research (and introspection) point to inconsistencies between plans and actual behaviour. This inconsisten...

We examine violations of dominance in intertemporal choice. Adding an immediate receipt to a delayed payment, or adding a delayed receipt to an immediate one, makes the prospect objectively better, and yet decreases the likelihood it will be chosen (better is worse). Conversely, adding an immediate payment to a delayed receipt, or adding a delayed...

Markowitz (Journal of Political Economy 60:151–158, 1952) identified a fourfold pattern of risk preferences in outcome magnitude: When outcomes are large, people are risk averse in gains and risk seeking in losses, but risk preferences reverse when the outcomes are small, with people exhibiting risk seeking in gains and risk aversion in losses. Thi...

Models of intertemporal choice draw on three evaluation rules, which we compare in the restricted domain of choices between smaller sooner and larger later monetary outcomes. The hyperbolic discounting model proposes an alternative-based rule, in which options are evaluated separately. The interval discounting model proposes a hybrid rule, in which...

Behavioural finance theories draw on evidence from psychology that suggest that some people respond to information in a biased manner, and construct theories of inefficient markets. However, these biases are not always robust when tested in economic conditions, which casts doubt on their relevance to market efficiency. We design an economic experim...

The strength/weight hypothesis is the claim that people are more persuaded by extreme evidence (high strength) than by reliable evidence (high weight), even when these two dimensions of evidence are diagnostically equivalent according to Bayes Rule. We investigate whether this hypothesis is supported when tested in a revealed preference experiment....

A robust anomaly in intertemporal choice is the delay-speedup asymmetry: Receipts are discounted more, and payments are discounted less, when delayed than when expedited over the same interval. We developed 2 versions of the tradeoff model (Scholten & Read, 2010) to address such situations, in which an outcome is expected at a given time but then i...

People prefer to receive good outcomes immediately rather than wait, and they must be compensated for waiting. But what influences their decision about how much compensation is required for a given wait? To give a partial answer to this question, we develop the DRIFT model, a heuristic description of how framing influences intertemporal choice. We...

Hyperbolic discounting of delayed rewards has been proposed as an underlying cause of the failure to stick to plans to forego one's immediate desires, such as the plan to diet, wake up early, or quit taking heroin. We conducted two tests of inconsistent planning in which respondents made at least two choices between a smaller-sooner (SS) and larger...

We extend the recently proposed tradeoff model of intertemporal choice (Scholten & Read, 2010) from choices between pairs of single outcomes to pairwise choices involving two-outcome sequences. The core of our proposal is that choices between sequences are made by weighing accumulated outcomes against outcome-adjusted delays. Thus extended, the tra...

Do individuals behave differently when they have to infer the probability of some uncertain event compared to when they are directly told the probability of an uncertain event? The answer to this question goes to the heart of the application of the Bayesian approach to decision-making under risk and uncertainty. Assume that enough information exist...

We describe the DRIFT model, a heuristic description of framing effects in intertemporal choice, and four experiments testing its implications. In the experiments we vary how outcomes are framed – either as total interest earned, as the rate of interest or, as is traditionally done in studies of intertemporal choice, as total amount earned. In addi...

The delay-speedup asymmetry is that a positive outcome is discounted more, and a negative outcome is discounted less, when it is delayed than when it is “sped up” over the same interval. To account for this asymmetry, Loewenstein and Prelec’s (1992) hyperbolic discounting model and Scholten and Read’s (2010) tradeoff model invoke reference dependen...

Two comparative models of intertemporal choice have recently been proposed as an alternative to the hyperbolic discounting model. One, the interval discounting model, retains the notion that intertemporal choice is governed by discounting, but proposes that discounting involves direct comparisons between the options along the time attribute. The ot...

We present the argumentation model, a new model of conflict in risky choice, and apply it to elementary tradeoffs between outcome probability and magnitude. The model postulates two deliberation modes: Pro-argumentation (focusing on advantages), the conflict from which is negatively related to tradeoff size, and contra-argumentation (focusing on di...

Several authors have reported an unconditional size effect in returns around earnings announcements. In this study we show how this finding can be understood as resulting from ambiguity aversion. We hypothesize that analyst forecasts for smaller companies are relatively more ambiguous; hence they are priced pessimistically by ambiguity-averse inves...

In 1992, a mental-models-based survey in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, revealed that educated laypeople often conflated global climate change and stratospheric ozone depletion, and appeared relatively unaware of the role of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions in global warming. This study compares those survey results with 2009 data from a sample of...

It is commonly assumed that people make intertemporal choices by "discounting" the value of delayed outcomes, assigning discounted values independently to all options, and comparing the discounted values. We identify a class of anomalies to this assumption of alternative-based discounting, which collectively shows that options are not treated indep...

Extended warranties are popular but expensive. This paper examines how consumers value these warranties, and asks whether economic considerations alone can account for their popularity. Results from two field surveys show that consumers greatly overestimate both the likelihood and the cost of product breakdown. However, these biases alone do not ex...

While consumers are often identified as a driver of the “business case” for corporate social responsibility, little is known about the precise impact CSR has on consumers. It has been widely speculated that socially responsible behavior will be subject to a halo effect whereby consumer awareness of one set of CSR actions (e.g., recycling) will infl...

Markowitz hypothesized a fourfold pattern of risk preferences, with risk aversion for large gains and small losses, but risk seeking for small gains and large losses. We test his hypothesis, and obtain two major results. One is the dispersion effect: A majority exhibits risk seeking and risk aversion for small and large gains, but disperses into fi...

The effects of different sales strategies on consumer product evaluation were investigated. It was expected that direct product experience could decrease economic product valuation. Experiments 1 and 2 studied the effects of product trials and money-back guarantees on consumer willingness to pay (WTP). It appeared that WTP was significantly lower a...

Personal utilitarianism applies act-utilitarianism to the problem of individual choice. It is based on the view that the good life is achieved through maximizing the sum of individual measures of utility over a population. the population being the sequence of semi-autonomous selves from which the individual is composed. I begin by showing how our l...

Hyperbolic discounting of delayed rewards has been proposed as the underlying cause of the failure to stick to plans to forego one’s immediate desires, such as the plan to diet, wake up early, or quit taking heroin. These planning failures could, however, result from other mechanisms that prior studies have not ruled out. We conducted two tests of...

Rational choice theory assumes agents have a set of basic preferences, and specifies rationality conditions that much be met to optimally satisfy those preferences. Most experimental studies in behavioural economics are either explicit tests of whether actual behaviour conforms to these rationality conditions, or else developments of theories that...

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A common finding in the literature is that returns are characterised by reversals or trends exhibiting predictable behaviour. A popular explanation for this is that investors systematically over or under react to information, depending on the circumstances. Although researchers have identified behavioural factors that theoretically may lead to such...

The subjective value given to time, also known as the psychological interest rate, or the subjective price of time, is a core concept of the microeconomic choices. Individual decisions using a unique and constant subjective interest rate will refer to an exponential discounting function. However, many empirical and behavioural studies underline the...

Utility is sometimes defined as being a way to summarise choice, and sometimes as the benefit we get from experience. In economics, the twentieth century saw the former definition supplant the latter. Recent research by Kahneman and colleagues has undertaken to resurrect the latter definition under the heading of “experience utility”. In this paper...

Decision makers often make snap judgments using fast-and-frugal decision rules called cognitive heuristics. Research into cognitive heuristics has been divided into two camps. One camp has emphasized the limitations and biases produced by the heuristics; another has focused on the accuracy of heuristics and their ecological validity. In this paper...

Decision makers often make snap judgments using fast-and-frugal decision rules called cognitive heuristics. Research into cognitive heuristics has been divided into two camps. One camp has emphasized the limitations and biases produced by the heuristics; another has focused on the accuracy of heuristics and their ecological validity. In this paper...

Thomas Schelling observed that when people use self-command to prevent their future selves from acting waywardly, they effectively divide themselves into two selves with conflicting desires for the same point. In the morning, for example, a dieter may not want dessert at dinnertime but change his mind when at table. This raises the question of whic...

ccording to most models of intertemporal choice, an agent's discount rate is a function of how far the outcomes are removed from the present, and nothing else. This view has been challenged by recent studies, which show that discount rates tend to be higher the closer the outcomes are to one another (subadditive discounting) and that this can give...

A set of exploratory studies and mental model interviews was conducted in order to characterize public understanding of climate change. In general, respondents regarded global warming as both bad and highly likely. Many believed that warming has already occurred. They tended to confuse stratospheric ozone depletion with the greenhouse effect and we...

Research in intertemporal choice has been done in a variety of contexts, yet there is a remarkable consensus that future outcomes are discounted (or undervalued) relative to immediate outcomes. In this paper, we (a) review some of the key findings in the literature, (b) critically examine and articulate implicit assumptions, (c) distinguish between...

The term utility is used to denote either the quantity of pleasure or pain arising from an outcome, or the preferences over outcomes reflected in choice behavior. The first use of the term is associated with utilitarian philosophers of the last century, and the second with twentieth-century economists. Recent developments in psychology and behavior...

We describe a new anomaly in intertemporal choice---the "date/delay effect": discount rates that are imputed when time is described using calendar dates (e.g., on October 17) are markedly lower than those revealed when future outcomes are described in terms of the corresponding delay (e.g., in six months). Date descriptions not only reduce discount...

This paper is a critical reflection on the use of monetary incentives in economic experiments. The argument is that incentives have their effect through their influence on one or more of three factors: (1) cognitive exertion; (2) motivational focus; (3) emotional triggers. I suggest that these effects can often be achieved without monetary incentiv...

Expertise can be acquired through experience or through education, and many occupations demand a mixture of both. In this paper we evaluate the level of expertise acquired through these two routes by comparing credit decisions made by professional credit managers (who have learned through experience rather than education) and lecturers and students...

The subjective value given to time, also known as the psychological interest rate, or the subjective price of time, is a core concept of the microeconomic choices. Individual decisions using a unique and constant subjective interest rate will refer to an exponential discounting function. However, many empirical and behavioural studies underline the...

Expertise can be acquired through experience or through education, and many occupations demand a mixture of both. In this paper we evaluate the level of expertise acquired through these two routes by comparing credit decisions made by professional credit managers (who have learned through experience rather than education) and lecturers and students...

We report three studies demonstrating the ‘lure of choice’ people prefer options that allow them to take further choices over those that do not, even when the extra choices cannot improve the ultimate outcome. In Studies 1 and 2, participants chose between two options: one solitary item, and a pair of items between which they would then make a furt...

The subjective value given to time, also known as the psychological interest rate, or the subjective price of time, is a core concept of the microeconomic choices. Individual decisions using a unique and constant subjective interest rate will refer to an exponential discounting function. However, many empirical and behavioural studies underline the...

Consumers often face choices between options that vary in their short- and long-term benefit. This article describes the marketing implications of what we know about how consumers make these choices. The focus is on how consumers put disproportionate weight on short-term benefits, thereby overconsuming goods offering small early benefits at a large...

How do people decide whether to sacrifice now for a future reward or to enjoy themselves in the present? Do the future gains of putting money in a pension fund outweigh going to Hawaii for New Year's Eve? Why does a person's self-discipline one day often give way to impulsive behavior the next? Time and Decision takes up these questions with a comp...

Much research shows that when it comes to preferences over sequences of money, such as a monthly paycheck, people do not always maximize present value. Rather, they often choose the lower-valued of a pair of sequences, especially when it has attractive properties such as an increasing trend. To unearth the reasons for sequence preferences we conduc...

The act-pattern model of altruism is primarily a brand-equity model, which holds that being altruistic can be traded for social benefits. This is a variant of the “selfish” altruism that Rachlin decries, with altruism being dictated by cold calculations. Moreover, personal and social “self-control” may not be as similar as Rachlin suggests – althou...

Benefits are often extended over time. One determinant of this benefit duration is how long a person will live to enjoy them. In four studies, we investigated whether people are sensitive to age when pricing benefits that will last for the remainder of one's life. In Study 1 drivers gave their willingness-to-pay (WTP) to cure a medical condition wh...

Intrapersonal dilemmas arise when people face choices between something that is good right now but bad for them in the long run (vice), and something that is not so good now but better in the long run (virtue). This article develops the idea that these dilemmas have many similarities to social dilemmas, in which options that are best for society ar...

Subadditive time discounting means that discounting over a delay is greater when the delay is divided into subintervals than when it is left undivided. This may produce the most important result usually attributed to hyperbolic discounting: declining impatience, or the inverse relationship between the discount rate and the magnitude of the delay. T...

The term "diversification bias" refers to the tendency for people to take more variety when choosing several items simultaneously than when choosing them sequentially. In this article, we investigate whether this really is a bias by measuring evaluations of sets chosen simultaneously or sequentially. In Experiment 1 participants made two choices be...

Multiattribute choice rules can be classified as being either alternative-based or attribute-based. Conventional accounts of intertemporal choice, hyperbolic and exponential discounting, assume alternative-based rules. One consequence of using these rules is that choices will be transitive, meaning that if a is preferred to b, and b is preferred to...

The concept of behavioural mass provides one avenue for justifying (or making rational) the phenomenon of declining impatience, according to which decision makers put more value on delays that will occur in the near future than on those that will occur later.

Many of the most significant choices that people make are between vices, which exchange small immediate rewards for large delayed costs, and virtues, which exchange small immediate costs for large delayed rewards. We investigate the consequences of making a series of such choices either simultaneously or sequentially. We made two predictions. First...

Social dilemmas occur when individuals make choices that are in their own best interest but not in the interest of society as a whole. Intrapersonal dilemmas occur when people make choices that are in the best interest of themselves at the moment of choice, but not in the best interest of themselves in the long run. A number of writers have observe...

We examine the relationship between memory for, and decisions about, pain. We test whether people's willingness to accept pain (WTAP) in exchange for money depends on whether they experienced a sample of a similar pain either moments earlier, or one week earlier. Inspired by Leventhal et al.'s two-factor theory of pain, we also manipulated whether...

When making many choices, a person can broadly bracket them by assessing the consequences of all of them taken together. or narrowly bracket them by making each choice in isolation. We integrate research conducted in a wide range of decision contexts which shows that choice bracketing is an important determinant of behavior. Because broad bracketin...

Preferences often fluctuate as a result of transient changes in hunger and other visceral states. When current decisions have delayed consequences, the preferences that should be relevant are those that will prevail when the consequences occur. However, consistent with the notion of an intrapersonal empathy gap (Loewenstein, 1996) we find that an i...

The AC electric and magnetic fields associated with high voltage power lines have become a concern as a possible health risk. In most cases the strength of these fields decreases as the inverse square of the distance from the line. In earlier work, we found that laypeople do not understand how rapidly field strength decreases with distance. Most be...

Two beliefs that act in concert have been proposed as the basis for the representativeness heuristic in general, and judgments about random sampling in particular: samples resemble their parent populations (resemblance), and random sampling is a self-correcting process (balancing). Based on the results of a preliminary experiment, we proposed the ‘...