Trust among the Avatars: A Virtual World Experiment, with and without Textual and Visual Cues

We invited “residents” of a virtual world who vary in real-world age and occupation to play a trust game with stakes comparable to “in world” wages. In different treatments, the lab wall was adorned with an emotively suggestive photograph, a suggestive text was added to the instructions, or both a photo and text were added. We find high levels of trust and reciprocity that appear still higher for non-student and older subjects. Variation of results by treatment suggests that both photographic and textual cues influenced the level of trust but not that of trustworthiness.trust; experiment; internet; virtual world; priming

Essays on Decisions Involving Recurring Financial Events

This dissertation explores what influences consumer financial decisions with consequences that recur over time, such as mortgages and recurring payment plans in contracts. This dissertation investigates two questions: (1) How do individual differences in intertemporal preferences influence how consumers think about recurring financial events? (2) How does the aggregation level used to describe the recurring financial consequences impact how consumers mentally represent the purchase? Taken together, this dissertation explores how consumers mentally represent recurring outcomes and express these preferences through choice. The first essay explores the relationship between individual differences in time preferences and decisions involving recurring payments in the domain of mortgage choices. It relates two components of an individual's time preference, a present bias (overvaluing immediate outcomes), and a personal discount rate (the exponential component of time preferences), to mortgage selection and the decision to strategically abandon a home worth less than its mortgage. Combining insights from an analytic model and a survey of 244 mortgaged households augmented by zip-code market house price data, this essay proposes that consumers with greater present bias and exponential discounting are more likely to choose mortgages that minimize up-front costs and be underwater. This model also suggests that present bias decreases the likelihood of walking away, but that higher discounting increases that likelihood, a result consistent with the data. Time preferences remain robust predictors with individual and market-level controls, and alternate model specifications. The second essay explores how the aggregation level of a recurring price (e.g. on a daily vs. a yearly basis) impacts how consumers mentally account for a contract's benefits. For example, if consumers are told the daily price of a car lease, they imagine the daily benefits of the car, and when they are told a monthly price they imagine their broader use of the car. This essay builds on the "pennies-a-day" model (Gourville 1998), which posits that narrowly framed recurring costs can increase a consumer's willingness to purchase by making the cost of a purchase seem trivial. The essay will present evidence that triviality is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for narrow framing to increase willingness to purchase and expand the domain of situations where such narrow framing increases purchase. Five web-based experiments suggest that scope insensitivity plays an important role in this effect since under recurring costs, consumers repeatedly "book" the most valued units, while under one-time costs consumers tend to experience less return to scale. Together, the two essays suggest that contracts involving recurring financial events are mentally represented differently from those with one-time financial events, and that content is then discounted based on intertemporal preferences

Slow and deliberate cooperation in the commons

We test how fast and slow thought processes affect cooperation for sustainability by manipulating time pressure in a dynamic common-pool resource experiment. Sustainable management of shared resources critically depends on decisions in the current period to leave enough stock so that future generations are able to draw on the remaining limited natural resources. An intertemporal common-pool resource game represents a typical dynamic for social dilemmas involving natural resources. Using one such game, we analyse decisions throughout time. We find that people in this context deplete the common resource to a greater extent under time pressure, which leads to greater likelihood of stock collapse. Preventing resource collapse while managing natural resources requires actively creating decision environments that facilitate the cognitive capacity needed to support sustainable cooperation

What's the best way to manage athletes with amenorrhea?

Ruling out secondary causes of amenorrhea is, of course, the first step. Once that's done, you can make a presumptive diagnosis of hypothalamic amenorrhea and advise the patient to increase caloric intake or decrease energy expenditure to promote the return of normal menses (strength of recommendation: C, expert consensus)

Data, Data Everywhere, and Still Too Hard to Link: Insights from User Interactions with Diabetes Apps

For those with chronic conditions, such as Type 1 diabetes, smartphone apps offer the promise of an affordable, convenient, and personalized disease management tool. How- ever, despite significant academic research and commercial development in this area, diabetes apps still show low adoption rates and underwhelming clinical outcomes. Through user-interaction sessions with 16 people with Type 1 diabetes, we provide evidence that commonly used interfaces for diabetes self-management apps, while providing certain benefits, can fail to explicitly address the cognitive and emotional requirements of users. From analysis of these sessions with eight such user interface designs, we report on user requirements, as well as interface benefits, limitations, and then discuss the implications of these findings. Finally, with the goal of improving these apps, we identify 3 questions for designers, and review for each in turn: current shortcomings, relevant approaches, exposed challenges, and potential solutions

Battle of Fredericksburg

A collecting card depicting a scene from the Battle of Fredericksburg. It is a part of a collection is number 4 in the series.https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/fvw-artifacts/3019/thumbnail.jp

Robert Edward Lee: The King of Spades

A collecting card depicting a portrait of Robert E. Lee on horseback. It is a part of a collection is number 12 in the series.https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/fvw-artifacts/2982/thumbnail.jp

Effect of Personalized Incentives on Dietary Quality of Groceries Purchased A Randomized Crossover Trial

Importance Many factors are associated with food choice. Personalized interventions could help improve dietary intake by using individual purchasing preferences to promote healthier grocery purchases. Objective To test whether a healthy food incentive intervention using an algorithm incorporating customer preferences, purchase history, and baseline diet quality improves grocery purchase dietary quality and spending on healthy foods. Design, Setting, and Participants This was a 9-month randomized clinical crossover trial (AB–BA) with a 2- to 4-week washout period between 3-month intervention periods. Participants included 224 loyalty program members at an independent Rhode Island supermarket who completed baseline questionnaires and were randomized from July to September 2018 to group 1 (AB) or group 2 (BA). Data analysis was performed from September 2019 to May 2020. Intervention Participants received personalized weekly coupons with nutrition education during the intervention period (A) and occasional generic coupons with nutrition education during the control period (B). An automated study algorithm used customer data to allocate personalized healthy food incentives to participant loyalty cards. All participants received a 5% grocery discount. Main Outcomes and Measures Grocery Purchase Quality Index–2016 (GPQI-16) scores (range, 0-75, with higher scores denoting healthier purchases) and percentage spending on targeted foods were calculated from cumulative purchasing data. Participants in the top and bottom 1% of spending were excluded. Paired t tests examined between-group differences. Results The analytical sample included 209 participants (104 in group 1 and 105 in group 2), with a mean (SD) age of 55.4 (14.0) years. They were predominantly non-Hispanic White (193 of 206 participants [94.1%]) and female (187 of 207 participants [90.3%]). Of 161 participants with income data, 81 (50.3%) had annual household incomes greater than or equal to $100 000. Paired t tests showed that the intervention increased GPQI-16 scores (between-group difference, 1.06; 95% CI, 0.27-1.86; P = .01) and percentage spending on targeted foods (between-group difference, 1.38%; 95% CI, 0.08%-2.69%; P = .04). During the initial intervention period, group 1 (AB) and group 2 (BA) had similar mean (SD) GPQI-16 scores (41.2 [6.6] vs 41.0 [7.5]) and mean (SD) percentage spending on targeted healthy foods (32.0% [10.8%] vs 31.0% [10.5%]). During the crossover intervention period, group 2 had a higher mean (SD) GPQI-16 score than group 1 (42.9 [7.7] vs 41.0 [6.8]) and mean (SD) percentage spending on targeted foods (34.0% [12.1%] vs 32.0% [13.1%]). Conclusions and Relevance This pilot trial demonstrated preliminary evidence for the effectiveness of a novel personalized healthy food incentive algorithm to improve grocery purchase dietary quality. Trial Registration ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT0374805