Research

This paper presents experimental and survey evidence that projective misperceptions—the tendency to project one’s current valuations or states onto the future—generate behavior that can be systematically misattributed to time preferences. In a real-effort experiment, individuals’ intertemporal choice is driven primarily by the projection of randomized decision states rather than by time discounting. This observed state dependence leads to up to 44 percent variation in time preference estimates, but can be remedied by experience-based learning. These findings imply that time preference estimates are inherently variable and context-dependent, and have implications for misperception-based policy design to address apparent self-control problems.

We study consumers' concerns for the ideological values of their market counterparts and the implications of such concerns for the public promotion of values. Using a survey and online and laboratory experiments, we find that consumers are willing to pay premiums to exchange with counterparts who demonstrate support for their values. When sellers anticipate the possibility of market exchange, they exhibit public support for consumers’ values. Our findings challenge notions that market exchange is impersonal, suggest that public value positions can provide a dimension of firm differentiation, and provide evidence that market exchange can influence public support for ideological values.

Can people counteract biased narratives with subsequent information? Using an online experiment where counteracting may have the best odds by design, we investigate this question by first randomly assigning subjects to read different narratives that contain the same facts, and then offering them the opportunity to acquire and process balanced arguments. We document three main findings. First, subjects shift their attitudes towards the standpoint of the randomly assigned narrative, knowing that the narrative is slanted and randomly assigned. Second, the opportunity to read additional arguments does not prompt subjects to counteract the persuasion effects of the initial narratives. Third, when evaluating subsequent arguments, participants find arguments aligned with the randomly assigned narrative more convincing. Results from additional treatments show that these findings qualitatively persist when the balanced arguments are provided two weeks after initial exposure to narratives. Only when we replace these arguments with the exact counter-narratives that subjects do not initially see are they able to fully counteract the effects. Taken together, our results highlight the importance of balanced and complete exposure at the outset in counteracting the influence of biased narratives.