President Obama’s budget proposal released this week has turned the arcane term “chained CPI” into a controversial buzz phrase. This new calculation for the Consumer Price Index (CPI) assumes that as prices rise, consumers will simply turn to lower-cost alternatives, thus softening the impact of the price hikes. For example More
Pacific Standard: IN THE SUMMER of 1995, a young graduate student in anthropology at UCLA named Joe Henrich traveled to Peru to carry out some fieldwork among the Machiguenga, an indigenous people who live north of Machu Picchu in the Amazon basin. The Machiguenga had traditionally been horticulturalists who lived More
Zoë Chance is a lecturer in marketing at the Yale School of Management. Her research includes consumer behavior, focusing on decision making and social welfare. We invited our Facebook and Twitter followers, as well as students, to submit questions based on Chance’s research, and here is what she had to More
The Wall Street Journal: I suspect your son is suffering from two decision biases. One, the status quo bias, has to do with our tendency to take our current situation as our reference point and to see any change as negative (or at least difficult) and with a high potential More
The Wall Street Journal: A few years ago, Mike Norton, Jeana Frost and I looked at the question of ambiguity and found exactly the mechanism you’re suggesting—that knowing less can lead to higher liking. Focusing on online dating, we found that when people read online profiles of potential partners that More
The Wall Street Journal: All it can take is a few TV images of Black Friday deal-chasing—the unruly crowds, packed parking lots and frigid midnight lines—to drive many shoppers straight to the Web for their holiday shopping. That is why this year, many malls around the country are promising Black More
