Yefim Roth

Senior Lecturer
Department of Human Services, University of Haifa

I study how small incentives and simple behavioral interventions shape judgment, decision making, and behavior. My research combines laboratory experiments and field studies to understand when interventions such as incentives, defaults, warnings, and gentle enforcement improve outcomes—and when they fail or backfire.

Across domains such as health, compliance, and decision support  systems, I examine how people learn from experience, how they acquire and use information, and how they respond to subtle changes in incentives and choice architecture. A central goal of my research is to identify interventions that are both effective and scalable in real-world settings.

Research

Behavioral field interventions and incentives
I study how small, scalable interventions can improve behavior in applied settings. This includes work on healthier food choices, repeated deposit contracts, and gentle rule enforcement in public-health contexts.

Learning from experience
Much of my research examines how people learn from repeated outcomes and how this learning produces systematic biases and departures from maximization. This work helps explain when experience improves decisions and when it can backfire.

Choice among advisors and decision aids
I am also interested in how people choose among advisors, experts, and decision aids, and in how experience shapes trust in human and algorithmic recommendations over time.

Information acquisition and checking
Another line of my work examines when people seek information and when they avoid it, including checking decisions, use of search agents, and the effects of defaults on information acquisition.

Methodological issues in behavioral research
I am also interested in methodological questions in experimental research, in particular, the role of attention checks in repeated decisions from experience.

Selected Publications

Erev, I., Ert, E., Plonsky, O., & Roth, Y. (2023). Contradictory deviations from maximization: Environment-specific biases, or reflections of basic properties of human learning? Psychological Review, 130(3), 640–676.

Roth, Y., Wänke, M., & Erev, I. (2016). Click or skip: The role of experience in easy-click checking decisions. Journal of Consumer Research, 43(4), 583–597.

Erev, I., Plonsky, O., & Roth, Y. (2020). Complacency, panic, and the value of gentle rule enforcement in addressing pandemics. Nature Human Behaviour, 4(11), 1095–1097.

Roth, Y. (2020). The decision to check in multialternative choices and limited sensitivity to default. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 33(5), 643–656.

Roth, Y., & Yakobi, O. (2024). Attention! Do we really need attention checks? Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 37(2), e2377.

Roth, Y., Waldman, G. M., & Erev, I. (2024). The impact of experience on the tendency to accept recommended defaults. Judgment and Decision Making, 19, e6.

Contact

Email: rothefim@gmail.com
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