Baruch Eitam

Abstract Evidence suggests that people are attracted to patterns and regularity. We hypothesized that decision-makers, intending to maximize profit, may be lured by the existence of regularity, even when it does not confer any additional value. An algorithm based on this premise outperformed all other contenders in an international challenge to bias individuals’ preferences.

Introduction A growing body of evidence has shown that believing in free will is associated with a variety of positive life outcomes, including feeling grateful for past events (MacKenzie et al., 2014), better job performance (Stillman et al., 2010), higher academic achievement (Feldman et al., 2016), passionate love (Boudesseul et al., 2016), satisfaction with life (Li et al., 2017), and lower levels of perceived stress (Crescioni et al., 2015).