It is therefore fair to ask: if people do not have
economic preferences, what do they have instead? Does psychology provide theoretical
notions that can account, at least in some contexts, both for apparent
violations of the rational model of preference and for the regularities of observed choices? Behavioral research has documented several psychological processes that
provide partial answers to this question, including concepts such as mental accounting,
loss aversion and hyperbolic discounting. To this set of conceptual tools the
present treatment adds the concept of attitude, which we borrow from social
psychology, and the core process}we label it affecti¨e ¨aluation}which determines
the sign and the intensity of the emotional response to objects.