Download or read book Essays on the Behavioral Economics of Social Preferences and Bounded Rationality written by Job August Harms and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Selten School of Behavioral Economics written by Axel Ockenfels and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-09-09 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reinhard Selten, to date the only German Nobel Prize laureate in economics, celebrates his 80th birthday in 2010. While his contributions to game theory are well-known, the behavioral side of his scientific work has received less public exposure, even though he has been committed to experimental research during his entire career, publishing more experimental than theoretical papers in top-tier journals. This Festschrift is dedicated to Reinhard Selten’s exceptional influence on behavioral and experimental economics. In this collection of academic highlight papers, a number of his students are joined by leading scholars in experimental research to document the historical role of the “Meister” in the development of the research methodology and of several sub-fields of behavioral economics. Next to the academic insight in these highly active fields of experimental research, the papers also provide a glance at Reinhard Selten’s academic and personal interaction with his students and peers.

Download or read book Three Essays in Behavioral Economics written by Daniel Kaiser Saunders and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation concerns two key topics in behavioral economics: bounded rationality and hyperbolic time preferences. While these two topics do not have much in common, per se, the analyses presented here do contain unifying themes. Each chapter focuses on issues pertaining to public economics. The environments are often characterized by strategic interaction, in that each individual's choices affects the welfare of others. In such cases, economic efficiency is by no means guaranteed.

Download or read book Bounded Rationality and Public Policy written by Alistair Munro and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-06-10 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about bounded rationality and public policy. It is written from the p- spective of someone trained in public economics who has encountered the enormous literature on experiments in decision-making and wonders what implications it has for the normative aspects of public policy. Though there are a few new results or models, to a large degree the book is synthetic in tone, bringing together disparate literatures and seeking some accommodation between them. It has had a long genesis. It began with a draft of a few chapters in 2000, but has expanded in scope and size as the literature on behavioural economics has grown. At some point I realised that the geometric growth of behavioural - search and the arithmetic growth of my writing were inconsistent with an am- tion to be exhaustive. As such therefore I have concentrated on particular areas of behavioural economics and bounded rationality. The resulting book is laid out as follows: Chapter 1 provides an overview of the rest of the book, goes through some basic de?nitions and identi?es themes.

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 Modern Developments in Behavioral Economics written by John Malcolm Dowling and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2007 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the field of behavioral economics and provides insights into the following questions: ? Does utility bring happiness?? How do emotions and personal perspectives color our economic decisions?? How do altruism, trust, fairness and justice come into play in game theory?? Why are some organizations so successful in implementing their objectives?? Can advances in neuroeconomics unlock the secrets of how decisions are made?The book looks at decision making and behavior from the point of view of (i) individual behavior and choice; (ii) group and interactive choice; and (iii) collective choices and decision making. In particular, it covers the following aspects: instances when bounded rationality leads to decisions inconsistent with standard economic assumptions; risk and the processes by which investors and consumers make decisions; altruistic and cooperative behavior as alternatives to competition; game theory as a way to explore motives of cooperation versus competition; the determinants of happiness and the relationship between utility and well-being; the concept of social capital, including motivations for charity and being a responsible citizen; how trust and fairness relate to economic actions and the motivation to cooperate rather than compete; behavior such as crime, corruption and bribery from ethical, social and economic viewpoints; and, finally, the decision making process of collective choice and how societies develop rules for governing themselves.This is the first book to bridge economics, psychology, sociology and political sciences and explain the nuanced subtleties of decision making.

Download or read book Essays in Behavioral Economics and Microeconomic Theory written by Lukas Bolte and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following my research interests, this dissertation covers two fields of economics--behavioral economics (Chapters 1 and 2) and microeconomic theory (Chapters 3 and 4). Behavioral economics. In the first strand of my research, I develop and experimentally test theories to better understand individual-level behavioral phenomena and biases. In the last decades, behavioral economists have documented a variety of behavioral phenomena and biases across a range of economic environments, including information avoidance in health and financial domains, default effects in dynamic choice, belief distortions and probability weighting in choices over lotteries, and time inconsistency in preferences over consumption sequences. Behavioral economists typically explain each of these phenomena with a distinct mechanism. In the first chapter titled ``Emotional Inattention'' (joint with Collin B. Raymond), I develop a model that can simultaneously generate all of these phenomena and more, helping provide a unified account for many observed biases. It is a model of attention allocation, where in addition to its usual instrumental role, attention generates and regulates emotions. This role has been highlighted by psychologists but is rarely formally studied by economists. This second role of attention leads decision-makers to ignore low-payoff situations, leading to the so-called ostrich effect (where individuals ignore poorly performing financial assets), avoidance of potentially negative health tests, and pessimistic defaults in order to account for future inattention. When attention is allocated across possible realizations of an unknown state, the decision-maker has as-if distorted beliefs with additional weight on states that receive high attention. Similarly, when attention is allocated across time, the decision-maker develops preferences over the timing of consumption--they value consumption more in time periods with high attention, leading to as-if discounting. Because my model suggests these biases all emerge from a desire to manage emotions, it comes with many new predictions and implications for policymaking. Many documented deviations from the Bayesian benchmark--e.g., individuals' tendency to neglect correlation when processing information--are traditionally attributed to bounded rationality and hence thought of as cognitive mistakes. In the second chapter, titled ``Motivated Mislearning: The Case of Correlation Neglect'' (with Tony Q. Fan), I show that such cognitive ``mistakes'' can arise because of preferences and may thus not be actual mistakes. We designed an experiment to study the role of motivated reasoning in correlation neglect. In the main treatment, participants receive potentially redundant signals about an ego-relevant state--their IQ test performance. We then ask them how likely the signals are from the same source (and thus contain redundant information). Participants generally underappreciate the extent to which identical signals are more likely to come from the same source, but the bias is stronger for identical ego-favorable signals than for identical ego-unfavorable signals. This suggests that individuals may neglect the correlation between desirable signals to sustain motivated beliefs. Thus, cognitive ``mistakes'' that have traditionally been attributed to bounded rationality may, in fact, be utility maximizing. Microeconomic theory. The second strand of my work uses the tools of applied microeconomic theory to understand equilibrium outcomes when economic agents interact. In the third chapter, titled ``Robust contracting under double moral hazard'' (with Gabriel Carroll; forthcoming at Theoretical Economics), I seek to understand the prevalence of profit-sharing rules in agency relationships between private agents. In franchising partnerships, for instance, the franchisee typically pays an upfront fee and a fixed share of the revenue as royalties to the franchisor. We study a general contracting problem between a principal and an agent where both parties need to exert effort for production to take place. We identify a specific virtue of linear contracts: They are robust to uncertainty about the details of the environment and provide the highest payoff guarantees. We thus offer a tractable general-purpose model of double moral hazard and specifically express the robustness intuition underlying linear contracts. In the fourth chapter, titled ``Interactions across multiple games: cooperation, corruption, and organizational design, '' (with Jonathan B. Bendor, Nicole Immorlica, and Matthew O. Jackson), I built a model to understand how desired cooperation and undesired cooperation (e.g., corruption) are interlinked and how organizations can encourage the former while discouraging the latter. We show that because cooperation in one situation may depend on expectations of cooperation in others, it may be impossible to get desirable types of cooperation without also getting undesirable ones. More generally, we characterize this interdependency and study how the level of cooperation depends on the assignment of workers to teams and teams to tasks. Lastly, we study performance bonuses, occupational safety, and whistle-blowing rewards as possibly effective tools to promote desired and limit undesired cooperation.

Download or read book Bounded Rationality and Behavioural Economics written by Graham Mallard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-08-14 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economics Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon developed the concept of bounded rationality in the 1950s. This asserts that the cognitive abilities of human decision-makers are not always sufficient to find optimal solutions to complex real-life problems, leading decision-makers to find satisfactory, sub-optimal outcomes. This was a foundational component of the development of Behavioural Economics but in recent years the two fields have diverged, each with its own literature, its own approach and its own proponents. Behavioural Economics explores the areas of commonality between Economics and Psychology, in terms of its focus and its approach, whereas the bounded rationality literature largely analyses the implications of sub-optimal decision‐making through the mathematically sophisticated methodology of mainstream Economics. This book examines the nature and consequences of this divergence and questions whether this is a case of beneficial specialisation or whether it is unhelpful, potentially stunting the development of some aspects of Economics. It has been suggested that the major deficiency of Behavioural Economics is that it has failed to produce a single, widely applicable alternative to constrained optimisation. This book evaluates the extent to which this is the true and, if it is, the extent to which it is a product of the divergence between the two literatures. It also seeks to identify commonalities between the two subjects and suggests avenues of research in Economics that would benefit from a re-fusion of these two fields.

Download or read book Behavioral Economics written by Masao Ogaki and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-02-05 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is intended as a textbook for a course in behavioral economics for advanced undergraduate and graduate students who have already learned basic economics. The book will also be useful for introducing behavioral economics to researchers. Unlike some general audience books that discuss behavioral economics, this book does not take a position of completely negating traditional economics. Its position is that both behavioral and traditional economics are tools that have their own uses and limitations. Moreover, this work makes clear that knowledge of traditional economics is a necessary basis to fully understand behavioral economics. Some of the special features compared with other textbooks on behavioral economics are that this volume has full chapters on neuroeconomics, cultural and identity economics, and economics of happiness. These are distinctive subfields of economics that are different from, but closely related to, behavioral economics with many important overlaps with behavioral economics. Neuroeconomics, which is developing fast partly because of technological progress, seeks to understand how the workings of our minds affect our economic decision making. In addition to a full chapter on neuroeconomics, the book provides explanations of findings in neuroeconomics in chapters on prospect theory (a major decision theory of behavioral economics under uncertainty), intertemporal economic behavior, and social preferences (preferences that exhibit concerns for others). Cultural and identity economics seek to explain how cultures and people’s identities affect economic behaviors, and economics of happiness utilizes measures of subjective well-being. There is also a full chapter on behavioral normative economics, which evaluates economic policies based on findings and theories of behavioral economics.

Download or read book The Law and Economics of Irrational Behavior written by Francesco Parisi and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 634 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays explores the most relevant developments at the interface of economics and psychology, giving special attention to models of irrational behavior, and draws the relevant implications of such models for the design of legal rules and institutions. The application of economic models of irrational behavior to law is especially challenging because specific departures from rational behavior differ markedly from one another. Furthermore, the analytical and deductive instruments of economic theory have to be reshaped to deal with the fragmented and heterogeneous findings of psychological research, turning towards a more experimental and inductive methodology. This volume brings together pioneering scholars in this area, along with some of the most exciting developments in the field of legal and economic theory. Areas of application include criminal law and sentencing, tort law, contract law, corporate law, and financial markets.

Download or read book Handbook of Contemporary Behavioral Economics written by Morris Altman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-01-30 with total page 1015 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a time when both scholars and the public demand explanations and answers to key economic problems that conventional approaches have failed to resolve, this groundbreaking handbook of original works by leading behavioral economists offers the first comprehensive articulation of behavioral economics theory. Borrowing from the findings of psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, legal scholars, and biologists, among others, behavioral economists find that intelligent individuals often tend not to behave as effectively or efficiently in their economic decisions as long held by conventional wisdom. The manner in which individuals actually do behave critically depends on psychological, institutional, cultural, and even biological considerations. "Handbook of Contemporary Behavioral Economics" includes coverage of such critical areas as the Economic Agent, Context and Modeling, Decision Making, Experiments and Implications, Labor Issues, Household and Family Issues, Life and Death, Taxation, Ethical Investment and Tipping, and Behavioral Law and Macroeconomics. Each contribution includes an extensive bibliography.

Download or read book Behavioral Economics written by Floris Heukelom and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-17 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a history of behavioral economics. The recurring theme is that behavioral economics reflects and contributes to a fundamental reorientation of the epistemological foundations upon which economics had been based since the days of Smith, Ricardo, and Mill. With behavioral economics, the discipline has shifted from grounding its theories in generalized characterizations to building theories from behavioral assumptions directly amenable to empirical validation and refutation. The book proceeds chronologically and takes the reader from von Neumann and Morgenstern's axioms of rational behavior, through the incorporation of rational decision theory in psychology in the 1950s–70s, to the creation and rise of behavioral economics in the 1980s and 1990s at the Sloan and Russell Sage Foundations.

Download or read book Bounded Rationality and Industrial Organization written by Ran Spiegler and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-18 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conventional economic theory assumes that consumers are fully rational, that they have well-defined preferences and easily understand the market environment. Yet, in fact, consumers may have inconsistent, context-dependent preferences or simply not enough brain-power to evaluate and compare complicated products. Thus the standard model of consumer behavior-which depends on an ideal market in which consumers are boundlessly rational-is called into question. While behavioral economists have for some time confirmed and characterized these inconsistencies, the logical next step is to examine the implications they have in markets. Grounded in key observations in consumer psychology, Bounded Rationality and Industrial Organization develops non-standard models of "boundedly rational" consumer behavior and embeds them into familiar models of markets. It then rigorously analyses each model in the tradition of microeconomic theory, leading to a richer, more realistic picture of consumer behavior. Ran Spiegler analyses phenomena such as exploitative price plans in the credit market, complexity of financial products and other obfuscation practices, consumer antagonism to unexpected price increases, and the role of default options in consumer decision making. Spiegler unifies the relevant literature into three main strands: limited ability to anticipate and control future choices, limited ability to understand complex market environments, and sensitivity to reference points. Although the challenge of enriching the psychology of decision makers in economic models has been at the frontier of theoretical research in the last decade, there has been no graduate-level, theory-oriented textbook to cover developments in the last 10-15 years. Thus, Bounded Rationality and Industrial Organization offers a welcome and crucial new understanding of market behavior-it challenges conventional wisdom in ways that are interesting and economically significant, and which in the end effect the well-being of all market participants.

Download or read book Models of Bounded Rationality written by Herbert Alexander Simon and published by MIT Press (MA). This book was released on 1984-01 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second volume collects his papers on behavioral theory, with some overlap between the two volumes.

Download or read book Essays on Behavioral Economics and Social Networks written by David Benjamin Zuckerman and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation contains three essays relating to behavioral economics and social networks. In the first chapter, I experimentally investigate third-party preferences for compensation and punishment after one party financially harms another for their own benefit. I find that demand for both compensation and punishment extends beyond pure distributional concerns, reflecting preferences for (what I term) compensatory and retributive justice, respectively. In the second chapter, I develop a simple model of friendship formation that provides insight into three key empirical patterns regarding homophily, our tendency to form connections with those most similar to us. In the model, agents have homophilic preferences along two dimensions, but homophily is only measured along a single dimension. Via simulations, I show that introducing this second dimension (qualitatively) generates all three noted patterns. In the final chapter, I and co-authors develop a dynamic theory of endogenous preference formation in which people adopt worldviews that shape their judgments about their experiences. The theory generates rich behavioral dynamics, illuminating a wide range of applications and providing potential explanations for a variety of observed phenomena.

Download or read book Essays in Behavioral Economics and Environmental Policy written by Steven E. Sexton and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social planners have long relied upon non-coercive interventions in order to achieve social welfare improvements that are not obtained by markets or direct policy. Such policies are perhaps nowhere more relevant and common than in environmental economics. Environmental goods and services are typically not traded in markets because of the difficulties of property rights assignment. And yet efforts to create markets or correct market failures by coercive policy are fraught with controversy. Thus, in addition to coercive mechanisms, social planners use information provision campaigns, appeals for cooperation, and "nudges" to improve the efficiency of environmental resource allocations. Non-coercive interventions have grown in popularity among social planners as behavioral economics has gained acceptance within the mainstream of the field. Indeed, such policies typically affect market outcomes and achieve environmental goals only insofar as they can exploit or correct decision making that deviates from standard theory. In this dissertation, agent behavior is analyzed to assess the potential of non-coercive interventions to achieve socially preferred environmental outcomes. In a first essay, the concept of conspicuous conservation is introduced as a modern variant of conspicuous consumption that affords status for displays of austerity meant to signal environmental preferences rather than displays of ostentation meant to signal wealth. I identify conspicuous conservation in the automobile market and estimate a willingness to pay up to several thousand dollars for the "green" signal transmitted by ownership of the Toyota Prius. In a second essay, I demonstrate how automatic bill payment programs can induce excessive consumption of goods and services by boundedly rational consumers who exhibit inattention to prices. As automatic payment programs have spread throughout industries characterized by recurring payments, from utility and telecommunication services to insurance and loan markets, this essay is the first to consider their implications for consumer demand and welfare. It is also the first to test empirically whether enrollment in such programs increases demand, as price salience theory suggests. It is shown that residential electricity consumption increases on average 2-4.5% due to enrollment in automatic payment programs, while commercial electricity consumption grows much as 6%. Moreover, bill-smoothing programs that utilities offer to low-income households are shown to induce an 8-9% increase in electricity consumption. A final essay examines the extent to which free transit fares and appeals for car-trip avoidance reduce car pollution on smoggy days. With data on freeway traffic volumes and transit ridership, public appeals for cooperation are shown to have no significant effect on car trip demand. Free transit fares, however, do have a significant effect on car trip demand. But the effect is perverse in that it generates an increase in car trips and related pollution. Free fares also increase transit ridership. These results suggest that free transit rides do not induce motorists to substitute to transit, but instead subsidize regular transit rides and additional trips. Appeals for cooperation also have no affect on carpooling behavior. Viewed in their totality, these essays communicate the importance of behavioral theories in formulating environmental policies and predicting agents' responses to such policies. Policies formulated without due regard for agents' bounded rationality and multifaceted motivations are doomed to unintended consequeces. However, recognition of these behavioral responses and their incorporation in policy design can result in improved environmental outcomes and efficient policies.

Download or read book The Varieties of Economic Rationality written by Michel Zouboulakis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-21 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concept of economic rationality is important for the historical evolution of Economics as a scientific discipline. The common idea about this concept -even between economists- is that it has a unique meaning which is universally accepted. This new volume argues that "economic rationality" is not not a universal concept with one single meaning, and that it in fact has different, if not conflicting, interpretations in the evolution of discourse on economics. In order to achieve this, the book traces the historical evolution of the concept of economic rationality from Adam Smith to the present, taking in thinkers from Mill to Friedman, and encompassing approaches from neoclassical to behavioural economics. The book charts this history in order to reveal important instances of conceptual transformation of the meaning of economic rationality. In doing so, it presents a uniquely detailed study of the historical change of the many faces of the homo oeconomicus .