Economics Insights @ CBS

Eight studies explored the antecedents and consequences of whether people locate their sense of self in the brain or the heart. In Studies 1a–f, participants' self-construals consistently influenced the location of the self: The general preference for locating the self in the brain rather than the heart was enhanced among men, Americans, and participants primed with an independent self-construal, but diminished among women, Indians, and participants primed with an interdependent self-construal.

It is becoming increasingly easier for researchers and practitioners to collect eye tracking data during online preference measurement tasks. We develop a dynamic discrete choice model of information search and choice under bounded rationality, that we calibrate using a combination of eye-tracking and choice data. Our model extends the directed cognition model of Gabaix et al. (2006) by capturing fatigue, proximity effects, and imperfect memory encoding and by estimating individual-level parameters and partworths within a likelihood-based, hierarchical Bayesian framework.

People frequently feel anxious. Although prior research has extensively studied how feeling anxious shapes intrapsychic aspects of cognition, much less is known about how anxiety affects interpersonal aspects of cognition. Here, we examine the influence of incidental experiences of anxiety on perceptual and conceptual forms of perspective taking.

This paper studies the competition between Web 2.0 communities in a game theoretic framework. We model three important features of these institutions: (i) firms' content is usually user-generated; (ii) consumers' content preferences are governed by local network effects, and (iii) consumers have strong tendencies to multi-home. Our analyses reveal that ex-ante identical community sites can acquire differentiated market positions that spontaneously emerge from user-generated content.