  Many important economic outcomes result from cumulative effects of smaller
choices, so the best outcomes require accounting for other choices at each
decision point. We document narrow bracketing -- the neglect of such accounting
-- in work choices in a pre-registered experiment on MTurk: bracketing changes
average willingness to work by 13-28%. In our experiment, broad bracketing is
so simple to implement that narrow bracketing cannot possibly be due to optimal
conservation of cognitive resources, so it must be suboptimal. We jointly
estimate disutility of work and bracketing, finding gender differences in
convexity of disutility, but not in bracketing.
