Evaluative conditioning (EC) is a change in the valence of a stimulus that results from pairing the stimulus with an affective stimulus. Two high-powered studies (total N = 1161) investigated the nature of the relationship between EC and contingency awareness measured as contingency memory. Stronger EC occurred among people with more accurate and more confident memory of the pairings. Awareness...

This paper demonstrates that quality-contingent pricing is a useful mechanism for mitigating the negative effects of quality uncertainty in e-commerce and IT services. A contingency pricing contract specifies a sequence of possible quality levels and corresponding prices. The market estimates the firms performance at various quality levels based on historical statistics, and the firm may have a...

Modern power grids are continuously monitored by trained system operators equipped with sophisticated monitoring and control systems. Despite such precautionary measures, large blackouts, that affect more than a million consumers, occur quite frequently. To prevent such blackouts, it is important to perform high-order contingency analysis in real time. However, contingency analysis is computati...

The concept of alternative stable states has long been a dominant framework for studying the influence of historical contingency in community assembly. This concept focuses on stable states, yet many real communities are kept in a transient state by disturbance, and the utility of predictions for stable states in explaining transient states remains unclear. Using a simple model of plant communi...

Expectancy value theory holds that goal-directed behavior is a function of (a) expectations—the belief that performance depends on effort, (b) instrumentality—the belief that outcome depends on performance, and (c) outcome value—the value attached to achieving the outcome. The present research provides a direct test of two factors involved in the instrumentality component: the contingency betwe...

In two experiments, participants made causal judgments from contingency information for problems with different objective contingencies. After the judgment task, the participants reported how their judgments had changed following each type of contingency information. Some reported idiosyncratic tendencies--in other words, tendencies contrary to those expected under associative-learning and norm...