No abstract

This work aims to identify and quantify the biases behind the anomalous behavior of people when they deal with the Three Doors dilemma, which is a really simple but counterintuitive game. Carrying out an artefactual field experiment and proposing eight different treatments to isolate the anomalies, we provide new interesting experimental evidence on the reasons why subjects fail to take the optimal decision. According to the experimental results, we are able to quantify the size and the impact of three main biases that explain the anomalous behavior of participants: Bayesian updating, illusion of control and status quo bias.

PurposeThe authors believe that comparing individuals to groups' decision making is crucial provided that many important choices in society are made by groups, i.e. committees, governing bodies, juries, business partners and families. This study aims to discuss the aforementioned topic.Design/methodology/approachThe authors analyze risky decision making in the context of the television game show Deal or No Deal – Italian edition. Specifically, the authors scrutinize and compare individual (standard “Deal or No Deal” edition) and group (special edition) choices in the risky choice context provided by programe.FindingsAfter analyzing contestant's behavior in the standard edition episodes plus a special edition the authors calculate a risk index observing that no statically significant difference is present between individuals' and groups' actions.Originality/valueIn the “Deal or No Deal” special edition contestant were groups of two strangers. It is not uncommon to have couples playing on TV, however the individuals usually know each other well and have relationships in real life. The special edition therefore provides a unique setting (absent to best of the authors’ knowledge in the literature) for investigation and could offer real-world insight. Indeed, in many instances the authors have to contract/make decisions with people the authors do not know/know very little (i.e. occasional business partners, representative at other companies/institutions, insurance/finance advisors, new work colleagues, etc.).

“I shop therefore I am” (R. Campbell), or putting it differently, we are what we buy, and the way we make our purchases influences the future choices of economic decision-makers. Therefore, our decisions are crucial in defining the future sustainability of the whole system. Despite the plethora of initiatives introduced to enhance consumers' consciousness, the gap between ideal and real consumption attitude still exists and is a non-negligible problem, since subjects' sustainability intention is not always followed by sustainable consumption. Therefore, by employing a natural field experiment, the present work explores consumers' real behavior toward sustainable switching. Specifically, this study examines how the impact of targeted communication leads to a market basket sustainable shift. Indeed, we observe how the consumer's basket composition varies from control (where no targeted communication is included) to treatment (where specific and detailed communication is introduced through ad-hoc on-site banner signals). Results show the positive impact of the communication; after the introduction of the communication, the share of sustainable products is higher compared with the non-sustainable set of products. As a further extension, we consider the role played by product aesthetics: even if the effect is marked for sustainable products preserving the characteristics of the conventional substitute, such effect vanishes when a subset of radically different products is considered.