Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1981). The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. science, 211(4481), 453-458.

The psychological principles that govern the perception of decision problems and the evaluation of probabilities and outcomes produce predictable shifts of preference when the same problem is framed in different ways. Reversals of preference are demonstrated in choices regarding monetary outcomes, both hypothetical and real, and in questions pertaining to the loss of human lives. …

Thaler, R. (1985). Mental accounting and consumer choice. Marketing science, 4(3), 199-214.

A new model of consumer behavior is developed using a hybrid of cognitive psychology and microeconomics. The development of the model starts with the mental coding of combinations of gains and losses using the prospect theory value function. Then the evaluation of purchases is modeled using the new concept of “transaction utility.” The household budgeting …

Matters, M. A. (1999). Mental accounting matters. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 12(3), 183-206.

Mental accounting is the set of cognitive operations used by individuals and households to organize, evaluate, and keep track of financial activities. Making use of research on this topic over the past decade, this paper summarizes the current state of our knowledge about how people engage in mental accounting activities. Three components of mental accounting …

Soman, D., & Gourville, J. T. (2001). Transaction decoupling: How price bundling affects the decision to consume. Journal of marketing research, 38(1), 30-44.

In today’s marketplace, price bundling is widespread: Manufacturers and retailers routinely offer multiple products for a single, bundled price. Although the effects of price bundling on purchase behavior have been well researched, the effects of price bundling on postpurchase consumption behavior have received almost no attention. In this article, the authors build on the sunk …

Conway, M., & Ross, M. (1984). Getting what you want by revising what you had. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47(4), 738-748.

Previous research has demonstrated that people recall their past in ways that exaggerate its consistency with their current condition. It is argued that whether people perceive stability or change in themselves depends, in part, on the theory they invoke to reconstruct their past. Two studies, with 106 undergraduates, addressed the impact of a potentially invalid …

Sanitioso, R., Kunda, Z., & Fong, G. T. (1990). Motivated recruitment of autobiographical memories. Journal of Personality and Social psychology, 59(2), 229-241.

We hypothesized that people motivated to believe that they possess a given trait search for autobiographical memories that reflect that trait, so as to justify their desired self-view. We led subjects to believe that either extraversion or introversion was desirable, and obtained convergent evidence from open-ended memory-listing tasks as well as from reaction time (RT) …

Buehler, R., Griffin, D., & Ross, M. (1994). Exploring the “planning fallacy”: Why people underestimate their task completion times.

Tested 3 hypotheses concerning people’s predictions of task completion times: (1) people underestimate their own but not others’ completion times, (2) people focus on plan-based scenarios rather than on relevant past experiences while generating their predictions, and (3) people’s attributions diminish the relevance of past experiences. Five studies were conducted with a total of 465 …

Choi, J., Kim, B. K., Choi, I., & Yi, Y. (2006). Variety-seeking tendency in choice for others: Interpersonal and intrapersonal causes. Journal of Consumer Research, 32(4), 590-595.

Ratner and Kahn demonstrated that individuals believed that others would seek more variety than they themselves would seek. Building on this finding, we expected the variety-seeking tendency to be greater when people made choices for others, and we examined the mechanisms of this phenomenon. Study 1 explored an interpersonal mechanism and demonstrated that variety seeking …

Read, D., & Loewenstein, G. (1995). Diversification bias: Explaining the discrepancy in variety seeking between combined and separated choices.

Recent research has revealed a pattern of choice characterized as diversification bias: If people make combined choices of quantities of goods for future consumption, they choose more variety than if they make separate choices immediately preceding consumption. This phenomenon is explored in a series of experiments in which the researchers first eliminated several hypotheses that …

Snyder, M., Tanke, E. D., & Berscheid, E. (1977). Social perception and interpersonal behavior: On the self-fulfilling nature of social stereotypes.

Examined the self-fulfilling influences of social stereotypes on dyadic social interaction. Conceptual analysis suggests that a perceiver’s actions based upon stereotype-generated attributions about a specific target individual may cause the behavior of that individual to confirm the perceiver’s initially erroneous attributions. A paradigmatic investigation of the behavioral confirmation of stereotypes involving physical attractiveness (e.g., “beautiful …