Clouds Make Nerds Look Good: Field Evidence of the Impact of Incidental Factors on Decision Making
23 Pages Posted: 8 Jun 2006
Date Written: August 2006
Abstract
Abundant experimental research has documented that incidental primes and emotions are capable of influencing people's judgments and choices. This paper examines whether the influence of such incidental factors is large enough to be observable in the field, by analyzing 682 actual university admission decisions. As predicted, applicants' academic attributes are weighted more heavily on cloudier days, and non-academic attributes on sunnier days. The documented effects are of both statistical and practical significance: changes in cloudcover can increase a candidate's predicted probability of admission by an average of up to 11.9%. These results also shed light on the causes behind the long demonstrated unreliability of experts making repeated judgments from the same data.
Keywords: Naturalistic decision making, priming, university admissions, incidental emotions, Field Data, bootstrapped experts
JEL Classification: A22, D10, D12
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
Winter Blues: A Sad Stock Market Cycle
By Mark J. Kamstra, Lisa A. Kramer, ...
-
The Halloween Indicator, 'Sell in May and Go Away': Another Puzzle
By Ben Jacobsen and Sven Bouman
-
Losing Sleep at the Market: The Daylight-Savings Anomaly
By Mark J. Kamstra, Lisa A. Kramer, ...
-
Are Investors Moonstruck? - Lunar Phases and Stock Returns
By Lu Zheng, Kathy Yuan, ...
-
Lunar Cycle Effects in Stock Returns
By Ilia D. Dichev and Troy D. Janes
-
Rain or Shine: Where is the Weather Effect?
By Ning Zhu and William N. Goetzmann
-
Rain or Shine: Where is the Weather Effect?
By Ning Zhu and William N. Goetzmann
-
By Ben Jacobsen and Wessel Marquering