Jonathan Levav

• Stanford University

Over the past 50 years, consumer researchers have presented extensive evidence that consumer preference can be swayed by the decision context, particularly the configuration of the choice set. Importantly, behavioral research on context effects has inspired prominent quantitative research on multialternative decision-making published in leading psy...

Résumé Les décisions de justice se fondent-elles uniquement sur les lois et les faits ? Le formalisme juridique estime que les juges appliquent des raisons légales aux faits d'une affaire de façon rationnelle, mécanique et délibérative. Au contraire, une approche réaliste soutient que des facteurs psychologiques, politiques et sociaux influencent l...

Consumers frequently engage in sequential decisions. This article explores whether the order of these decisions can influence the manner in which consumers search through the possible choice options. Results from five studies suggest that ordering decisions by increasing (vs. decreasing) choice-set size leads to greater search depth (measured by bo...

Shapard and Weinshall-Margel (1) elucidate several critiques of our article, “Extraneous factors in judicial decisions” (2), in which we report a greater likelihood of judicial ruling in favor of a prisoner at the beginning of the work day or after a food break than later in a sequence of cases. They argue that two interlinked factors jointly produ...

Are judicial rulings based solely on laws and facts? Legal formalism holds that judges apply legal reasons to the facts of a case in a rational, mechanical, and deliberative manner. In contrast, legal realists argue that the rational application of legal reasons does not sufficiently explain the decisions of judges and that psychological, political...

For most forms of conscious consumer choice, product attributes serve as the means that consumers use to accomplish their goals. Because there is competition between products in the marketplace, consumption decisions typically present conflict between means to achieve a goal. In this article, we examine the consequences of conflict between regulato...

Why do affective forecasting errors persist in the face of repeated disconfirming evidence? Five studies demonstrate that people misremember their forecasts as consistent with their experience and thus fail to perceive the extent of their forecasting error. As a result, people do not learn from past forecasting errors and fail to adjust subsequent...

We show that minimal physical contact can increase people's sense of security and consequently lead them to increased risk-taking behavior. In three experiments, with both hypothetical and real payoffs, a female experimenter's light, comforting pat on the shoulder led participants to greater financial risk taking. Further, this effect was both medi...

Differentiated product models are predicated on the belief that a product's utility can be derived from the summation of utilities for its individual attributes. In one framed field experiment and two natural field experiments, we test this assumption by experimentally manipulating the order of attribute presentation in the product customization pr...

Why does an event feel more or less distant than another event that occurred around the same time? Prior research suggests that characteristics of an event itself can affect the estimated date of its occurrence. Our work differs in that we focused on how characteristics of the time interval following an event affect people's feelings of elapsed tim...

This article examines the effect of spatial confinement on consumer choices. Building on reactance theory and the environmental psychology literature, we propose that spatially confined consumers react against an incursion to their personal space by making more varied and unique choices. We present four laboratory experiments and one field study to...

Mental accounting posits that people track their expenditures using cognitive categories or “mental accounts.” The authors propose that this cognitive process can be complemented by an approach that examines how feelings about a sum of money, or the money’s “affective tag,” influence its consumption. When people receive money under negative circums...

Preference consistency implies that people have learned their willingness to trade off attributes. We argue that this is not necessarily the case. Instead, we show that when preferences are learned in context (e.g., through repeated choices made from a trinary choice set that includes an asymmetrically dominated decoy), people learn a context speci...

In three experiments, we examined the mere-measurement effect, wherein simply asking people about their intent to engage in a certain behavior increases the probability of their subsequently engaging in that behavior. The experiments demonstrate that manipulations that should affect the ease of mentally representing or simulating the behavior in qu...

This article demonstrates that subjective knowledge (i.e., perceived knowledge) can affect the quality of consumers' choices by altering where consumers search. We propose that subjective knowledge increases the likelihood that consumers will locate themselves proximate to stimuli consistent with their subjective knowl-edge. As such, subjective kno...

The authors provide evidence that people typically evaluate conditional probabilities by subjectively partitioning the sample space into n interchangeable events, editing out events that can be eliminated on the basis of conditioning information, counting remaining events, then reporting probabilities as a ratio of the number of focal to total even...

contributed equally to this work; order of authorship is alphabetical. Target-specific affect management 2 In this paper we study the regulation of affect attributed to a target object, which we label targetspecific affect management (TSAM). Although TSAM and affect regulation are complementary phenomena with an identical goal—reduction of negative...

People are often called on to make an assessment of the relative likelihood of events (e.g., which of two investments is more likely to outperform the market?) and their complements (which of the two investments is more likely to perform no better than the market?). Probability theory assumes that belief orderings over events and their complements...