New Yorkers Commute More Everywhere: Contrast Effects in the Field

Previous experimental research has shown that people's decisions can be influenced by options they have encountered in the past. This paper uses PSID data to study this phenomenon in the field, by observing how long people commute after moving between cities. It is found, as predicted, that (i) people choose longer commutes in a city they have just moved to, the longer the average commute was in the city they came from, and (ii) when they move again within the new city, they revise their commute length, countering the effect their origin city had on their initial decision.

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