Download or read book Essays on Decision making Under Risk and Ambiguity in Theory and Laboratory Experiments written by Marie-Charlotte Guetlein and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Experimental Analysis of Decision making Under Risk and Ambiguity written by Julen Carlos Ortiz De Zarate Pina and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Decision Making Under Uncertainty written by Santiago Ignacio Sautua and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three chapters about decision making under uncertainty. Chapter 1: "Testing between Models of Smoking Risk Perceptions" Research in social and health psychology reports that smokers systematically underestimate the personal smoking risk. I build a model that captures potential determinants of smoking risk perceptions to investigate how smoking may cause an underestimation of the risk. The model is based on the premise that smokers have an incentive to be optimistic: because quitting may be hard, they find it reassuring to think that smoking is not so risky. Drawing upon the theoretical framework, I suggest two empirical tests of the model--one using survey data and another based on a laboratory experiment. Chapter 2: "Does Uncertainty Cause Inertia in Decision Making? An Experimental Study of the Role of Regret Aversion and Indecisiveness" Previous research has shown that in many situations there is clear inertia in individual decision making--that is, a tendency for decision makers to choose a status quo option. The status quo option may be the result of a previous choice, or may simply be the option designated as the "default." While inertia may simply reflect the fact that individuals view the status quo option as optimal, there are other factors that may explain this observed behavior. I conduct a laboratory experiment to thoroughly investigate two potential determinants of inertia in uncertain environments: (i) regret aversion and (ii) indecisiveness. A decision maker may experience regret when the outcome of a choice compares unfavorably to the outcome that would have occurred had she made a different choice. Alternatively, a decision maker may be indecisive among the options if she does not know the probability distributions over the relevant outcomes. I use a between-subjects design, with varying conditions, to identify the effects of regret aversion and indecisiveness on choice behavior. In each condition, participants choose between two simple real gambles, one of which is assigned to be the status quo. I find that inertia is quite large and that both mechanisms are equally important. Chapter 3: "Risk, Ambiguity, and Diversification" Attitudes toward risk influence the decision to diversify among uncertain options. Yet, because in most situations the probability distributions over outcomes are unknown, attitudes toward ambiguity may also play an important role. In a simple laboratory experiment, I investigate the effect of ambiguity on the decision to diversify. Participants have the opportunity to diversify between gambles; in one condition, all gambles are risky, whereas in the other all gambles are ambiguous. I find that diversification is more prevalent and more persistent under ambiguity than under risk. Moreover, excess diversification under ambiguity is driven by participants who stick with a status quo gamble when diversification is not feasible. This behavioral pattern cannot be accommodated by major theories of choice under ambiguity.

Download or read book Decision Making Under Risk written by Marcela Tarazona-Gomez and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using laboratory experiments as a tool, this dissertation contributes to the debate of decision making under risk three domains : The first essay presents the results of an experiment that elicits prudence and risk aversion. We find that the majority of subjects are prudent and that a big proportion is simultaneously prudent and risk averse, even if we find no correlation between prudence and risk aversion. The second essay investigates the effect of uncertainty on the decision to finance a public good. Our theoretical prediction is that risk adverse individuals will reduce their contributions to the production of a public good when facing more uncertainty. Results reveal that this prediction is confirmed but only for economists, and that non economists rather increase their contributions. In the last essay we elicit individual preferences over social risk. We analyze if these preferences are correlated with individual preferences over individual risk and over the well-being of others. We find that social risk attitudes closely approximate individual risk attitudes.

Download or read book Decision Research on Time Risk and Ambiguity written by Yitong Wang and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay explores how to counteract the uncertainty effect bias by appropriately manipulating either the anchoring process or the adjustment process involved in the bias. First, I examine how providing an anchor prior to judging the value of the lottery affects individuals' judgments, and find that anchoring on the worst outcome counteracts the uncertainty effect. Then I investigate if omitting information about the probability of the outcomes to create an ambiguous lottery affects individuals' judgments, and find that this is not sufficient to counteract the uncertainty effect. Finally, I explore if introducing additional cognitive load dampens over-adjustment and thus affect individuals' judgments, and find that additional cognitive load is able to counteract the uncertainty effect bias. In an intertemporal choice context, the second essay investigates decision makers' subjective perception of the temporal duration between now and the time they would receive future payments. I show that participants' subjective perceptions of temporal duration are not independent of the outcome magnitudes, where larger monetary outcomes are associated with shorter subjective time perception (experiments 1 & 2). Furthermore, this difference in temporal perception can help us explain the magnitude effect. My results replicate the magnitude effect when taking only objective time into account but show a constant discount rate when taking subjective time perception into account (experiment 3). The third essay investigates the impacts of an ambiguous time on decision making over time. In the first experiment, employing hypothetical scenarios and a between-subjects design, I found that in some situations, decision makers may discount more when facing an ambiguous time delay than facing the end of the ambiguous span. Furthermore, a reversed magnitude effect, the gain/loss asymmetry, and the short term/long term asymmetry phenomenon were observed in experiment 1. In experiment 2, I tested the effects we found in experiment 1 with real payoffs. First, the observed effect that people over-discount an outcome with an ambiguous realizing time was found only in individual level data analyses. Second, I found that the short term/long term asymmetry appeared in all cases across different conditions and experiment design.

Download or read book Uncertain Decisions written by Luigi Luini and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uncertain Decisions: Bridging Theory and Experiments presents advanced directions of thinking on decision theory - in particular the more recent contributions on non-expected utility theory, fuzzy decision theory and case-based theory. This work also provides theoretical insights on measures of risk aversion and on new problems for general equilibrium analysis. It analyzes how the thinking that underlies the theories described above spills over into real decisions, and how the thinking that underlies these real decisions can explain the discrepancies between theoretical approaches and actual behavior. This work elaborates on how the most recent laboratory experiments have become an important source both for evaluating the leading theory of choice and decision, and for contributing to the formation of new models regarding the subject.

Download or read book Social and Economic Factors in Decision Making under Uncertainty written by Kinga Posadzy and published by Linköping University Electronic Press. This book was released on 2017-11-16 with total page 16 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The objective of this thesis is to improve the understanding of human behavior that goes beyond monetary rewards. In particular, it investigates social influences in individual’s decision making in situations that involve coordination, competition, and deciding for others. Further, it compares how monetary and social outcomes are perceived. The common theme of all studies is uncertainty. The first four essays study individual decisions that have uncertain consequences, be it due to the actions of others or chance. The last essay, in turn, uses the advances in research on decision making under uncertainty to predict behavior in riskless choices. The first essay, Fairness Versus Efficiency: How Procedural Fairness Concerns Affect Coordination, investigates whether preferences for fair rules undermine the efficiency of coordination mechanisms that put some individuals at a disadvantage. The results from a laboratory experiment show that the existence of coordination mechanisms, such as action recommendations, increases efficiency, even if one party is strongly disadvantaged by the mechanism. Further, it is demonstrated that while individuals’ behavior does not depend on the fairness of the coordination mechanism, their beliefs about people’s behavior do. The second essay, Dishonesty and Competition. Evidence from a stiff competition environment, explores whether and how the possibility to behave dishonestly affects the willingness to compete and who the winner is in a competition between similarly skilled individuals. We do not find differences in competition entry between competitions in which dishonesty is possible and in which it is not. However, we find that due to the heterogeneity in propensity to behave dishonestly, around 20% of winners are not the best-performing individuals. This implies that the efficient allocation of resources cannot be ensured in a stiff competition in which behavior is unmonitored. The third essay, Tracing Risky Decision Making for Oneself and Others: The Role of Intuition and Deliberation, explores how individuals make choices under risk for themselves and on behalf of other people. The findings demonstrate that while there are no differences in preferences for taking risks when deciding for oneself and for others, individuals have greater decision error when choosing for other individuals. The differences in the decision error can be partly attributed to the differences in information processing; individuals employ more deliberative cognitive processing when deciding for themselves than when deciding for others. Conducting more information processing when deciding for others is related to the reduction in decision error. The fourth essay, The Effect of Decision Fatigue on Surgeons’ Clinical Decision Making, investigates how mental depletion, caused by a long session of decision making, affects surgeon’s decision to operate. Exploiting a natural experiment, we find that surgeons are less likely to schedule an operation for patients who have appointment late during the work shift than for patients who have appointment at the beginning of the work shift. Understanding how the quality of medical decisions depends on when the patient is seen is important for achieving both efficiency and fairness in health care, where long shifts are popular. The fifth essay, Preferences for Outcome Editing in Monetary and Social Contexts, compares whether individuals use the same rules for mental representation of monetary outcomes (e.g., purchases, expenses) as for social outcomes (e.g., having nice time with friends). Outcome editing is an operation in mental accounting that determines whether individuals prefer to first combine multiple outcomes before their evaluation (integration) or evaluate each outcome separately (segregation). I find that the majority of individuals express different preferences for outcome editing in the monetary context than in the social context. Further, while the results on the editing of monetary outcomes are consistent with theoretical predictions, no existing model can explain the editing of social outcomes.

Download or read book Experiments in decision making under Risk written by Michał Wiktor Krawczyk and published by Rozenberg Publishers. This book was released on 2009 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Risk Ambiguity and Decision written by Daniel Ellsberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-07-03 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ellsberg elaborates on "Risk, Ambiguity, and the Savage Axioms" and mounts a powerful challenge to the dominant theory of rational decision in this book.

Download or read book Essays on Decision Making Under Ambiguity written by Xiangyu Qu and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: This dissertation is composed of a collection of six distinct papers on decision making under ambiguity.

Download or read book Comparing Decisions Under Compound Risk and Ambiguity written by Sasha Prokosheva and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 27 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I investigate the relationship between attitudes towards ambiguity and the ability to reduce compound risks. The evidence from an experiment on adolescents shows that patterns identified in the previous literature are susceptible to experimental implementation and the characteristics of the subjects. Cognitive skills and the way lotteries are presented affect reduction of compound risks differently to ambiguity neutrality. My results suggest that theoretical studies which model ambiguity preferences by relaxing the assumption of compound risk reduction should be viewed with caution, and I add to the evidence against the use of compound lotteries to represent ambiguous environments in experiments.

Download or read book Experiments in Environmental Economics written by Jason F. Shogren and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-27 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title was first published in 2003.Over the decades, experiential methods have become an established research tool in environmental economics. Economists working in this area have realised that experimental methods from economics and other disciplines such as psychology and decision theory can be applied to gain insight into the behavioral underpinnings of environmental policy. Economic experiments, in the lab and field, are an attractive tool to address the incentive and contextual questions that arise in environmental policy. Experiments have been and continue to be designed to capture the key elements of market and non-market choices to test theory, for pattern recognition, to testbed new institutions, and to value public goods, including environmental protection. This volume collects the most significant papers in the literature that identify the underpinnings of experimental approaches are complemented by works that specifically address the use of experimental economics to identify choice under risk, conflict, cooperation, environmental policy instruments, and environmental valuation

Download or read book Advances in Decision Making Under Risk and Uncertainty written by Mohammed Abdellaoui and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-08-29 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether we like it or not we all feel that the world is uncertain. From choosing a new technology to selecting a job, we rarely know in advance what outcome will result from our decisions. Unfortunately, the standard theory of choice under uncertainty developed in the early forties and fifties turns out to be too rigid to take many tricky issues of choice under uncertainty into account. The good news is that we have now moved away from the early descriptively inadequate modeling of behavior. This book brings the reader into contact with the accomplished progress in individual decision making through the most recent contributions to uncertainty modeling and behavioral decision making. It also introduces the reader into the many subtle issues to be resolved for rational choice under uncertainty.

Download or read book Essays on Dynamic Decision Making Under Ambiguity written by Konstantinos Georgalos and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Handbook of the Economics of Risk and Uncertainty written by Mark Machina and published by Newnes. This book was released on 2013-11-14 with total page 897 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The need to understand the theories and applications of economic and finance risk has been clear to everyone since the financial crisis, and this collection of original essays proffers broad, high-level explanations of risk and uncertainty. The economics of risk and uncertainty is unlike most branches of economics in spanning from the individual decision-maker to the market (and indeed, social decisions), and ranging from purely theoretical analysis through individual experimentation, empirical analysis, and applied and policy decisions. It also has close and sometimes conflicting relationships with theoretical and applied statistics, and psychology. The aim of this volume is to provide an overview of diverse aspects of this field, ranging from classical and foundational work through current developments. - Presents coherent summaries of risk and uncertainty that inform major areas in economics and finance - Divides coverage between theoretical, empirical, and experimental findings - Makes the economics of risk and uncertainty accessible to scholars in fields outside economics

Download or read book Prospect Theory written by Daniel Kahneman and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 27 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Individuele en Sociale Beslissingen Bij Onzekerheid written by Stefan Tobias Trautmann and published by Rozenberg Publishers. This book was released on 2008 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In most decisions we have to choose between options that involve some uncertainty about their outcomes and their effect on our well-being. Casual observation and carefully controlled studies suggest that, in making these decisions, we often deviate from the benchmark of expected income maximization. This should not come as a surprise. Our well-being is affected by many factors, and the outside observer does not know the importance of various dimensions of the outcome to the decision maker. Even if goals are well defined, it is far from obvious that we succeed in choosing what is best for us. The psychological literature has shown deviations from optimal behavior in simple decision tasks, and we may expect similar deviations to occur in more complex real life problems. In real life situations, however, experience and market interaction will help to restrain suboptimal behavior. This thesis examines deviations from expected income maximization in situations involving uncertainty. We focus on deviations generated by social factors.