were used to measure affective forecasting errors related to personality. They found that college students who predicted their future emotions about their exam scores were unable to relate these emotions to their own dispositional happiness. To further investigate personality neglect, Quoidbach and Dunn studied happiness in relation to neuroticism. People predicted their future feelings about the outcome of the 2008 US presidential election between Barack Obama and John McCain. Neuroticism was correlated with impact bias, which is the overestimation of the length and intensity of emotions. People who rated themselves as higher in neuroticism overestimated their happiness in response to the election of their preferred candidate, suggesting that they failed to relate their dispositional happiness to their future emotional state. The term "projection bias" was first introduced in the 2003 paper "Projection Bias in Predicting Future Utility" by Loewenstein, O'Donoghue and Rabin. Market Applications to Projection Bias The novelty of new products oftentimes overexcites consumers and results in the negative consumption externality of impulse buying. To counteract such, George Loewenstein recommends offering "cooling off" periods for consumers. During such, they would have a few days to reflect on their purchase and appropriately develop a longer-term understanding of the utility they receive from it. This cooling-off period could also benefit the production side by diminishing the need for a salesperson to "hype" certain products. Transparency between consumers and producers would increase as "sellers will have an incentive to put buyers in a long-run average mood rather than an overenthusiastic state". By implementing Loewentstein's recommendation, firms that understand projection bias should minimize information asymmetry; such would diminish the negative consumer externality that comes from purchasing an undesirable good and relieve sellers from extraneous costs required to exaggerate the utility of their product. Life-Cycle Consumption Projection bias influences the life cycle of consumption. The immediate utility obtained from consuming particular goods exceeds the utility of future consumption. Consequently, projection bias causes "a person to (plan to) consume too much early in life and too little late in life relative to what would be optimal". Graph 1 displays decreasing expenditures as a percentage of total income from 20 to 54. The period following where income begins to decline can be explained by retirement. According to Loewenstein's recommendation, a more optimal expenditure and income distribution is displayed in Graph 2. Here, income is left the same as in Graph 1, but expenditures are recalculated by