Category
Preferences, Utility & Social Preferences
31 free guides in this category.
12 guides
Preference Malleability & Context
Anchoring and Adjustment
How first numbers quietly steer your judgments and choices, even when they shouldn’t.
Read guideAttribute Framing
How describing the same quality in positive versus negative terms sways our judgments and decisions.
Read guideChoice Overload
The paradoxical effect where having too many options leads to decision paralysis, lower satisfaction, and regret.
Read guideCoherent Arbitrariness
Our initial choices are often random, but our subsequent choices are logically consistent with that first arbitrary decision.
Read guideJoint vs. Separate Evaluation
Our preferences for an option can flip depending on whether we see it alone or next to alternatives, a bias driven by what's easiest to compare.
Read guideMental Accounting
Our tendency to treat money differently depending on its source or intended use, leading to irrational financial decisions.
Read guidePreference Reversals
Our choices between two options can flip depending on whether we are asked to choose one or assign a value to each.
Read guideProjection Bias
The tendency to incorrectly assume that our future preferences and feelings will be the same as our current ones.
Read guideChoice Architecture
Learn to identify how the presentation of choices subtly influences your decisions.
Read guideThe Compromise Effect
The tendency to favor an intermediate option in a set, avoiding choices that are perceived as extreme.
Read guideDecoy Effect
Adding an inferior option to a choice set can shift preferences between the original options, violating rational choice assumptions.
Read guideConstructed Preferences
Our choices are often built in the moment based on context, rather than being drawn from stable, pre-existing desires.
Read guide6 guides
Risk & Prospect Theory
Allais and Ellsberg Paradoxes
Two classic experiments revealing how human decisions consistently violate standard economic theories about rational choice under uncertainty.
Read guideAmbiguity Preferences
Our tendency to avoid unknown probabilities more than known risks, shaping decisions from medical choices to financial investments.
Read guideCertainty Equivalent & Risk Premium
The guaranteed amount you'd accept instead of a risky option, and the extra reward you require for taking that risk.
Read guideProspect Theory
People value losses about twice as much as equivalent gains, and decisions depend on reference points rather than final outcomes.
Read guideRisk Attitudes & Arrow-Pratt Measures
How people differ in their tolerance for uncertainty, and how economists measure those differences through the curvature of utility functions.
Read guideStochastic Dominance
A method for ranking risky choices by determining if one option is objectively better than another, regardless of your risk tolerance.
Read guide5 guides
Social Preferences & Fairness
Dictator, Ultimatum, and Trust Games
Laboratory experiments revealing how people care about fairness, reciprocity, and trust beyond pure self-interest.
Read guideGift Exchange in Labor Markets
A theory explaining how higher-than-market wages and other non-contractual rewards can lead to increased employee effort, driven by mutual reciprocity.
Read guideInequality Aversion Models
Economic models explaining why people often reject profitable deals that feel unfair, revealing our deep preference for fair outcomes over pure self-interest.
Read guideReciprocity and Intentions-Based Models
Explores why the same action can feel like a kind gift or a calculated insult, depending on the intentions we perceive behind it.
Read guideWelfare Weights
A framework for understanding how we value and weight different people's well-being when making collective decisions, revealing our deeper moral priorities.
Read guide3 guides
Time Preferences & Discounting
Commitment Devices
Tools we create today to bind our future selves, helping us follow through on intentions when willpower alone isn't enough.
Read guideDiscounted Utility
Why we value immediate rewards over future ones—and how this shapes our decisions.
Read guideHyperbolic Discounting
Our tendency to strongly prefer immediate rewards over future ones, even when waiting would actually give us more.
Read guide4 guides
Utility & Revealed Preference
Ordinal vs. Cardinal Utility
Learn the difference between simply ranking your preferences (ordinal) and assigning them a specific, measurable value (cardinal).
Read guidePreference Axioms & Utility
Mathematical rules that guarantee consistent choices can be represented as maximizing a single utility score—foundational for economics and decision science.
Read guideRandom Utility & Discrete Choice
A framework explaining why people make different choices even when facing the same options, combining consistent preferences with unobserved factors.
Read guideRevealed Preference & Afriat's Theorem
A framework for understanding preferences through observable choices, with a mathematical guarantee that consistent choices reveal underlying rational utility.
Read guide1 guide