Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 375

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 74 of the 74 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Coarse Thinking and Persuasion*

Mullainathan, Sendhil, Schwartzstein, Joshua, Shleifer, Andrei·2008·Quarterly Journal of Economics
DOI 10.1162/qjec.2008.123.2.577
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

We present a model of uninformative persuasion in which individuals "think coarsely": they group situations into categories and apply the same model of inference to all situations within a category. Coarse thinking exhibits two features that persuaders take advantage of: (i) transference, whereby individuals transfer the informational content of a given message from situations in a category where it is useful to those where it is not, and (ii) framing, whereby objectively useless information influences individuals' choice of category. The model sheds light on uninformative advertising and product branding, as well as on some otherwise anomalous evidence on mutual fund advertising.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1162/qjec.2008.123.2.577

Cites

74 of 74 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 74 references

Cited by

See all 375

Metadata

Authors
Mullainathan, S., Schwartzstein, J., & Shleifer, A.
Venue
Quarterly Journal of Economics
Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP)
Published
2008-05
Volume
123
Issue
2
Pages
577-619
ISSN
  • 0033-5533 (ISSN-L)
  • 1531-4650
DOI
10.1162/qjec.2008.123.2.577
OpenAlex
W2105806371
Cited by
375
References
74
FWCI
10.85
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Coarse Thinking and Persuasion*. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1162/qjec.2008.123.2.577
The paper
Mullainathan, S., Schwartzstein, J., & Shleifer, A. (2008). Coarse Thinking and Persuasion*. Quarterly Journal of Economics. https://doi.org/10.1162/qjec.2008.123.2.577

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.