Hal Hershfield, Cassie Mogilner Holmes and Uri Barnea, “People Who Choose Time over Money Are Happier”
Money and time are both scarce resources that people believe would bring them greater happiness. But would people prefer having more money or more time? And how does one’s preference between resources relate to happiness? Across studies, Hershfield, Holmes and co-author Barnea asked thousands of Americans whether they would prefer more money or more time. Although the majority of people chose more money, choosing more time was associated with greater happiness — even controlling for existing levels of available time and money. Additional studies and experiments provide insight into choosers’ underlying rationale and the causal direction of the effect.
Cassie Mogilner Holmes Bio
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Randolph Bucklin and Paul Hoban (Ph.D. '14), “Effects of Internet Display Advertising in the Purchase Funnel: Model-Based Insights from a Randomized Field Experiment”
Bucklin and Hoban examine the effects of internet display advertising using cookie-level data from a field experiment at a financial tools provider. Their experiment randomized assignment of cookies to treatment (firm ads) and control conditions (charity ads), enabling the authors to handle different sources of selection bias, including targeting algorithms and browsing behavior. They analyze display ad effects for users at different stages of the company’s purchase funnel and find that display advertising positively affects visitation to the firm’s website for users in most stages of the purchase funnel, but not for those who previously visited the site without creating an account. Using a binary logit model, the authors calculate marginal effects and elasticities by funnel stage and analyze the potential value of reallocating display ad impressions across users at different stages. Expected visits increase almost 10 percent when display ad impressions are partially reallocated from nonvisitors and visitors to authenticated users. The authors also show that results from the controlled experiment data differ significantly from those computed using standard correlational approaches.
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Marissa Sharif (Ph.D. '17) & Suzanne Shu, “The Effect of an Emergency Reserve on Self-Control Performance”
The presence of an emergency reserve in a mental budget can improve self-control by providing appropriate balance between indulgent flexibility and stringent goals. Reserves appear to work by reducing depletion and increasing task motivation. Shu and Sharif demonstrate that including an explicitly defined emergency reserve, an extra-defined amount above an initial limitation, helps improve self-control performance by providing a compromise between these two extremes.
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