Principal Investigator Drazen Prelec
Project Website http://nel.mit.edu/behavioral-economics
Projects here begin with a puzzling observation about human behavior. For example, why do people buy lottery tickets and insurance at the same time? Why are they willing to spend much more when purchasing with a credit card, and why do many prefer debit cards over credit cards? Why do they succumb to addictive overconsumption? Why do citizens bother to vote in a referendum, when their vote is not likely to affect the result.
These puzzles are sought and exploited for theoretical leverage, for their ability to force a rethinking of some aspect of the rational model, usually leading to an alterative computational theory.