Open research questions in Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics

What the literature leaves open

• The study has several limitations that should be kept in mind when appreciating its conclusions. First, some limitations are related to the nature of the sample. We recruited a small sample size for a Bayesian multivariate analysis with multiple outcomes. While Bayesian estimation does not require fixed sample size rules, the reliability of posterior estimates depends on both data informativeness and prior specification. In our analyses, we used default priors that may have impacted the precision for some parameters. Therefore, the results should be interpreted cautiously, and future studies could benefit from larger samples and/or weakly informative priors to improve estimation stability. Furthermore, the sample is not fully representative: most participants were middle-aged, male, and relatively well-educated traders, recruited through a trading course. This recruitment strategy may introduce selection bias and limits the generalizability of the findings. Future studies should aim for more diverse and representative samples to enhance external validity. Actually, the population of traders is likely to be heterogeneous. Despite we carefully measured variables regarding the nature of trading activity to ensure the comparability of the The Journal of Gambling Issues, 2026 11 The Journal of Gambling Issues, 2026 www.cdspress.ca results with other studies, empirical investigations in the field of trading face an intrinsic difficulty due to the great heterogeneity of the type of financial products traded as well as the nature of the training of traders. This may motivate future studies to examine the presence of subtypes of traders. Then, we used only self-report questionnaires to assess the variables. Ideally, a future replication of the study may want to add tasks measuring impulsivity as well as the collection of some behavioral indicators of trading, such as trading volume and frequency. A last limitation of the study that may encourage the replication and extension of our study lies in the lack of measurement of potential confounding variables related to mental health. Indeed, the association between variables may be due to the role of other underlying mental disorders, such as other behavioral addictions.

  A Multidimensional Investigation of The Role of Impulsivity In Problematic Trading · 2026 · DOI

• Future research should focus on designing interventions—whether educational, nudges within FinTech platforms, or advisory protocols—aimed at helping investors leverage social capital benefits while mitigating overconfidence inflation.

  The Social Genesis of Overconfidence: How Social Capital and Risk Tolerance Shape Investor Decisions · 2026 · DOI

• for This study provides a theoretically grounded and statistically robust methodology evaluating how cognitive biases function within organizational decision-making under stress. By advancing beyond direct-effect models, this approach introduces time pressure and task complexity as critical moderating mechanisms that dynamically alter cognitive processing in the workplace. Theoretically, this framework of bounded rationality out of extends application the the financial sector and into While this study provides robust empirical evidence for the moderating roles of time pressure and complexity, the cross- sectional design inherently limits causal inference. Cross-sectional survey data captures a specific moment in time, meaning potential endogeneity cannot be entirely ruled out. Future research should employ longitudinal designs or experimental methodologies with instrumental variables to further isolate the causal mechanisms by which these stressors amplify or suppress cognitive biases over time.

  Methodology for investigating moderating relationships in cognitive biases within workplace decision-making · 2026 · DOI

• Despite this study not being able to establish causality, the findings highlight the cognitive advantages associated with chess expertise and suggest potential areas for further research on the transfer of cognitive skills from chess to other domains and differences in general abilities between experts and novices.

  Planning, Cognitive Reflection, Inter-Temporal Choice, and Risky Choice in Chess Players: An Expertise Approach · 2025 · DOI

• On the whole, the complex data suggest that further research on the HHF would be helpful for implementing novel ways of avoiding the fallacy, if needed.

  Metacognitive Awareness and the Hot Hand: When Winning, No Amount of Awareness Will Have Strong Believers Avoid the Heuristic · 2023 · DOI

• Moreover, although there have been attempts to explain the semantic congruity effect within evidence accumulation models, two possible accounts for the congruity effect have been proposed but their specific predictions have not been compared directly, using a model that could quantitatively account for both; a shift in the starting point of evidence accumulation or a change in the rate at which evidence is accumulated.

  A drift diffusion model account of the semantic congruity effect in a classification paradigm · 2017 · DOI

• 1007/s11238-017-9592-1 , 2017) fills the gaps in the literature and answers the questions: when and how to satisfice? He achieves this by setting the decision problem in an ambiguous situation (so that probabilities do not exist, and many preference functionals can therefore not be applied) and by using the Minimax Regret criterion as the preference functional.

  When and how to satisfice: an experimental investigation · 2017 · DOI

• The conventional method of calculating AUC, by summing the areas of the trapezoids formed by successive delay-indifference point pairings, does not account for the fact that most delay discounting tasks scale delay pseudoexponentially, that is, time intervals between delays typically get larger as delays get longer.

  An alternative approach to calculating Area‐Under‐the‐Curve (AUC) in delay discounting research · 2016 · DOI

• Doctors choose in which unit to put patients who have chest pain (Green & Mehr, 1997), whether surgery is warranted, and whether the benefits of a drug outweigh the disadvantages for a given individual.

  Making a Choice: Self-Other Differences in Decision Making in Risky Situations · 2015

• However, how the CRT predicts normative decision‐making performance is unclear, and little is known about the extent to which the CRT predicts real‐life decision outcomes.

  Cognitive Reflection Predicts Real‐Life Decision Outcomes, but Not Over and Above Personality and Decision‐Making Styles · 2015 · DOI

• Overall, this series of experiments suggests that the sunk cost error may arise in part because persistence is the default behavioral strategy in situations where the contingencies for escape and persistence are insufficiently disparate and/or it is relatively difficult to discriminate when to escape.

  THE SUNK COST EFFECT WITH PIGEONS: SOME DETERMINANTS OF DECISIONS ABOUT PERSISTENCE · 2012 · DOI

• The important open question is that of rule selection, and we propose a 2-step process in which the task itself and the individual's memory constrain the set of applicable rules, whereas the individual's processing potential and the (perceived) ecological rationality of the rule for the task guide the final selection from that set.

  Intuitive and deliberate judgments are based on common principles. · 2011 · DOI

• Abstract While research on counterfactuals has closely examined the psychological antecedents and consequences of thinking counterfactually (imagining alternatives to past events), little is known about the effects of counterfactual communication, and in particular, how such thoughts are interpreted by others.

  It could have been better: The effects of counterfactual communication on impression formation · 2009 · DOI

• In three studies, 69 moderately experienced poker players estimated the probability of obtaining the best cards among all players, based on the limited information that is known in the early stages of a hand.

  Probability estimation in poker: A qualified success for unaided judgment · 2009 · DOI

• Although the principle of bounded rationality seems more realistic for formulating formal models of individual choice behaviour than traditional decision-outcome-based discrete choice models, existing studies have some limitations: (1) applications focus on the noncompensatory nature of the models and largely ignore the factor-selection process; (2) heterogeneity of heuristics in reaching a decision is insufficiently studied; (3) the choice of decision strategy is rarely modeled formally.

  Cognitive Process Model of Individual Choice Behaviour Incorporating Principles of Bounded Rationality and Heterogeneous Decision Heuristics · 2009 · DOI

• Given the prevalence of non-self–other differences, combined with the difficulty of getting null findings published, we feel that the conclusion that monetary decision making generally does not produce self–other differences is warranted, although there are likely some situations where this general trend does not hold.

  A Social Values Analysis of Self–Other Differences in Decision Making Involving Risk · 2008 · DOI

• We propose that the temporal dimension is fragile in that choices are insufficiently sensitive to it, and second, such sensitivity as exists is exceptionally malleable, unlike other dimensions such as money, which are attended by default.

  The Fragility of Time: Time-Insensitivity and Valuation of the Near and Far Future · 2007 · DOI

• In any event, while no agreement was achieved on a unifying averaging principle, Grace's (1994) contextual choice model (CCM) of choice in concurrent-chains schedules served as a general model of choice that provided a satisfactory account of preference for variable delays.

  Context as a variable influencing risky choice: A review. · 2006 · DOI

• The contradictory results from the investigations in the perspective of human trait theory give the challenge to the prospect theory and raise the assumption that people have the personality trait - propensity to risk that could explain at least the part of human risky decision making and risk taking behavior.

  The stability of risk level across various decision situations · 2003 · DOI

• The three experiments ( N = 881, 205, and 117) suggest that basic anchoring is a weak effect limited to the precise manipulations used by Wilson et al .

  The fragile basic anchoring effect · 2002 · DOI

• Why do multi-attribute choices so often depart from classical weighted-additive decision rules? Rather than attributing such deviations solely to biases or heuristics, we propose a resource-rational account in which value differences are encoded via capacity-limited information channels.

  Goal-dependent resource-rational compression of attribute differences explains nonlinearities in multi-attribute decision making · 2026 · DOI

• However, whether affective symptoms primarily amplify threat avoidance or dampen motivational drive remains debated, and behavioural studies yield inconsistent findings.

  Attenuation of value-to-evidence translation drives biased decision making in anxiety and depression · 2026 · DOI

• However, despite their fundamental nature, they have remained understudied as possible deep-level influences on the formation of occupational preferences of young people about to choose a job to embark on.

  Job Choice Under Crisis Conditions: Differences in Motivational Systems and Job-Attribute Preferences of Young Adults · 2025 · DOI

• ABSTRACT Research on intuition often produces conflicting results and suffers from reliability issues due to the lack of tools that can conclusively evaluate a person's latent intuitive position.

  Intuition in Decision Making: Insights From Drift Diffusion Modeling · 2025 · DOI

• By adopting an exploratory, configurational perspective, this study highlights the nuanced ways in which illegitimate tasks can influence proactive work behavior and encourages further research on the complex dynamics between task characteristics and employee agency.

  Illegitimate Tasks and Demand Crafting: How Configurations of Illegitimacy Shape Proactive Coping at Work · 2025 · DOI

Most-cited papers in Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics

• Reconceptualizing the Determinants of Risk Behavior · Academy of Management Review · 1992 · 1,603 citations
• A Discounting Framework for Choice With Delayed and Probabilistic Rewards. · Psychological Bulletin · 2004 · 1,207 citations
• Probabilistic mental models: A Brunswikian theory of confidence. · Psychological Review · 1991 · 893 citations
• A systematic review of algorithm aversion in augmented decision making · Journal of Behavioral Decision Making · 2019 · 668 citations
• The Willingness to Pay–Willingness to Accept Gap, the “Endowment Effect,” Subject Misconceptions, and Experimental Procedures for Eliciting Valuations · American Economic Review · 2005 · 561 citations
• Ambiguity and uncertainty in probabilistic inference. · Psychological Review · 1985 · 522 citations
• Intuitive and deliberate judgments are based on common principles. · Psychological Review · 2011 · 484 citations
• Self-evaluation of decision-making: A general Bayesian framework for metacognitive computation. · Psychological Review · 2016 · 443 citations
• Designing Information Provision Experiments · Journal of Economic Literature · 2023 · 434 citations
• The base rate fallacy reconsidered: Descriptive, normative, and methodological challenges · Behavioral and Brain Sciences · 1996 · 413 citations

Most recent work

• Anchoring Bias in the Tradeoff Procedure Within Multi‐Attribute Value Theory · Journal of Behavioral Decision Making · 2026
• Behavioral Finance and Impact on Investor Decision Making · International Journal of Emerging Research in Science Engineering and Management · 2026
• Between Confidence and Clarity: Objective and Subjective Expertise Differentially Predict Use of Alignable and Nonalignable Product Attributes · Journal of Behavioral Decision Making · 2026
• Demystifying the Role of Goal-Related Processes in Explaining the Effects of Emotion on Information-Seeking Decisions · Emotion Review · 2026
• Confirmation Bias Exists in the Face of False Information · bioRxiv · 2026
• SΔϕ-21 AI-READABLE Package — Judgment as Intuition Authority Assignment (v1.0) · Open MIND · 2026
• Methodology for investigating moderating relationships in cognitive biases within workplace decision-making · Frontiers in Psychology · 2026
• The Metacognitive Sensitivity of Verbal and Numerical Confidence Reports · bioRxiv · 2026
• Value‐based decision‐making and behavioral economic constructs that distinguish people with and without cannabis use history · Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior · 2026
• When Fear Meets Joy: Cultural Differences in the Impact of Decision Uncertainty on Fear of Better Options and Ditto Consumption · Behavioral Sciences · 2026

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