Essays in psychology and economics

Is human judgment fundamentally relative? An assumption in most economic models is that a prior judgment, such as the evaluation of a job candidate or a criminal defendant, should influence subsequent decisions only in the event of new information or a change in preferences or budget constraint.;Chapters 1 and 2 present a theoretical framework and empirically test this assumption in the field in light of laboratory evidence for contrast effects: A bias where a decision-maker comparatively perceives information in contrast to what preceded it.;The empirical focus is an analysis of three distinct settings: Exam evaluation in a large undergraduate course, sentencing decisions by judges in PA courts, and decisions to date in a series of speed dating sessions. I first argue that the order of targets in each setting is plausibly random. I then document a negative correlation in the sequential evaluations of each setting. Finally, I demonstrate that the negative influence of past evaluations is confined to recent periods. Predictions from a model of sequential decision-making suggest that the differential influence of recent periods is consistent with the presence of a perceptual bias but not alternative explanations such as learning or evaluative quotas.;The final chapter, coauthored with Vikram Pathania, challenges a second, very different, laboratory finding with evidence from the field: Evidence equating the danger of cell phone use while driving to illicit levels of alcohol. We investigate the causal link between driver cell phone use and crash rates by exploiting a natural experiment---the discontinuity in marginal pricing at 9pm on weekdays when cellular plans transition from "peak" to "off-peak" pricing.;We first document that this pricing threshold induces a 20 to 30% jump in call volume for two samples of callers, and then estimate the corresponding change in the crash rate using various control periods. We find no evidence for a relative rise in crashes attributable to cellular use. The upper bounds of our estimates rule out increases in all crashes larger than 1.0% and increases in fatal crashes larger than 1.3%. These upper bounds reject the increases implied by most existing studies.;A central theme of this dissertation engages the differences and complementarity between the laboratory and the field. Accordingly, each chapter reconciles findings across the two settings and discusses how field evidence might inform and supplement insights gleaned from the laboratory.