An experiment tested whether and in what circumstances people are more likely to believe an event simply because it makes them better off. Subjects observed a financial asset’s historical price chart, and received both an accuracy bonus for predicting the price at some future point, and an unconditional award that was either increasing or decreasing in this price. Despite incentives for hedging...

The notion that desire for an outcome inflates optimism about that outcome has been dubbed the desirability bias or wishful thinking. In this paper, we discuss the importance of distinguishing wishful thinking from the more general concept of motivated reasoning, and we explain why documenting overoptimism or correlations between preferences and optimism is not sufficient to infer a desirabilit...

ONE OF THE thorny problems of software development is accurately assessing progress and the cost remaining to completion. Without a good sense of where the project is and how far it still has to go, it’s just not possible to consistently manage people and resources well. And miscommunicating progress to stakeholders is among the surest ways to lose trust and buy-in. Despite a plethora of techno...

People tend towards wishful thinking, in which they overestimate the probability of favorable outcomes and underestimate the probability of unfavorable outcomes. Many explanations for this phenomenon focus on its irrationality. We explore whether wishful thinking could actually help people make better decisions given that they have limited cognitive resources. We consider a situation in which m...

As a supplement to our lead editorial, the editors of the new journal, Epidemiologic Perspectives & Innovations, provide a partial list of specific analyses and topic areas they would like to see submitted to the journal.

Permission is herewith granted to Università degli studi di Bologna to circulate and to have copied for non-commercial purposes, at its discretion, the above title upon the request of individuals or institutions. iii Acknowledgements The essential work reported in this thesis was carried out during my visiting periods at the University of Glasgow in the Autumn 2005 and at the Lancaster Universi...