Using survival prediction techniques to learn consumer-specific reservation price distributions.

A consumer's "reservation price" (RP) is the highest price that s/he is willing to pay for one unit of a specified product or service. It is an essential concept in many applications, including personalized pricing, auction and negotiation. While consumers will not volunteer their RPs, we may be able to predict these values, based on each consumer's specific information, using a model learned from earlier consumer transactions. Here, we view each such (non)transaction as a censored observation, which motivates us to use techniques from survival analysis/prediction, to produce models that can generate a consumer-specific RP distribution, based on features of each new consumer. To validate this framework of RP, we run experiments on realistic data, with four survival prediction methods. These models performed very well (under three different criteria) on the task of estimating consumer-specific RP distributions, which shows that our RP framework can be effective.

Miscalibration in predicting one's performance: Disentangling misplacement and misestimation.

When people predict their performance, they can be miscalibrated in two ways-they may mispredict how they will perform relative to others (misplacement) and how they will perform in absolute terms (misestimation). Prior work has yielded contradictory conclusions about the relative direction of these two types of miscalibration. Some research found that they occur in opposite directions-that is, that people who believe they are better than average (BTA) tend to underestimate their absolute performance, whereas those who believe they are worse than average (WTA) tend to overestimate their performance. Other studies found that the two types of miscalibration occur in the same direction-that is, that people with BTA beliefs tend to overestimate their performance. We reconcile these apparently conflicting findings by disentangling placement beliefs that are correct from those that are erroneous and focusing on the latter as only these represent instances of misplacement. Two field studies reveal a key asymmetry-erroneous BTA beliefs are primarily driven by misestimation of one's own absolute performance, whereas erroneous WTA beliefs tend to be driven by misestimation of others' absolute performance. A reexamination of data from Moore and Small (2007) supports this insight about the sources of misplacement beliefs. The findings suggest that the conflicting conclusions from prior work might have been attributable to differences in the extent to which results were based on observations with erroneous (as opposed to correct) placement beliefs. This research provides novel insights into the psychology of miscalibration in performance predictions and helps unify seemingly contradictory prior findings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Enacting rituals to improve self-control.

Rituals are predefined sequences of actions characterized by rigidity and repetition. We propose that enacting ritualized actions can enhance subjective feelings of self-discipline, such that rituals can be harnessed to improve behavioral self-control. We test this hypothesis in 6 experiments. A field experiment showed that engaging in a pre-eating ritual over a 5-day period helped participants reduce calorie intake (Experiment 1). Pairing a ritual with healthy eating behavior increased the likelihood of choosing healthy food in a subsequent decision (Experiment 2), and enacting a ritual before a food choice (i.e., without being integrated into the consumption process) promoted the choice of healthy food over unhealthy food (Experiments 3a and 3b). The positive effect of rituals on self-control held even when a set of ritualized gestures were not explicitly labeled as a ritual, and in other domains of behavioral self-control (i.e., prosocial decision-making; Experiments 4 and 5). Furthermore, Experiments 3a, 3b, 4, and 5 provided evidence for the psychological process underlying the effectiveness of rituals: heightened feelings of self-discipline. Finally, Experiment 5 showed that the absence of a self-control conflict eliminated the effect of rituals on behavior, demonstrating that rituals affect behavioral self-control specifically because they alter responses to self-control conflicts. We conclude by briefly describing the results of a number of additional experiments examining rituals in other self-control domains. Our body of evidence suggests that rituals can have beneficial consequences for self-control. (PsycINFO Database Record

Aspects of endowment: a query theory of value construction.

How do people judge the monetary value of objects? One clue is provided by the typical endowment study (D. Kahneman, J. L. Knetsch, & R. H. Thaler, 1991), in which participants are randomly given either a good, such as a coffee mug, that they may later sell ("sellers") or a choice between the good and amounts of cash ("choosers"). Sellers typically demand at least twice as much as choosers, inconsistent with economic theory. This result is usually explained by an increased weighting of losses, or loss aversion. The authors provide a memory-based account of endowment, suggesting that people construct values by posing a series of queries whose order differs for sellers and choosers. Because of output interference, these queries retrieve different aspects of the object and the medium of exchange, producing different valuations. The authors show that the content and structure of the recalled aspects differ for selling and choosing and that these aspects predict valuations. Merely altering the order in which queries are posed can eliminate the endowment effect, and changing the order of queries can produce endowment-like effects without ownership.