:::

【AEW Webinar】Behavioral Attenuation


  • 研討會日期 : 2024-10-03
  • 時間 : 08:30
  • 主講人 : Professor Benjamin Enke
  • 地點 : Register and join online
  • 演講者簡介 : Professor Benjamin Enke received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Bonn in 2016. He is currently an Associate Professor at Harvard University. His research interests are Experimental and Behavioral Economics, Cultural Economics, and Political Economy.
  • 演講摘要 : We report a large-scale examination of behavioral attenuation, the hypothesis that, due to information-processing constraints, the elasticity of people’s decisions with respect to economic fundamentals is generally too small. We implement more than 30 experiments, 20 of which were crowd-sourced from leading experts. These experiments cover a broad range of economic decisions, from choice and valuation to belief formation, from strategic games to generic optimization problems, involving investment, savings, effort supply, product demand, taxes, environmental externalities, fairness, cooperation, beauty contests, information disclosure, search, policy evaluation, memory, forecasting and inference. In over 93% of our experiments, the elasticity of decisions to fundamentals decreases in participants’ cognitive uncertainty, our measure of the severity of information-processing constraints. Moreover, in decision problems with objective solutions, we observe elasticities that are universally smaller than is optimal. Many widely-studied decision anomalies represent special cases of behavioral attenuation. We discuss both the limits of behavioral attenuation and why it often gives rise to the classic phenomenon of diminishing sensitivity.
  • Working Paper Title : Narrowly Rational
  • Working Paper Speaker : Professor Songfa Zhong
  • Working Paper Speaker Biography : Professor Songfa Zhong received his Ph.D. in Economics from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2009. He is currently a Professor at the National University of Singapore (on leave). His primary research interests are Behavioral Economics, Experimental Economics, Genoeconomics, and Neuroeconomics.
  • Working Paper Abstract : We investigate narrowly rational behavior—consistency within each setting and inconsistency across settings. In a series of experiments, we compare portfolio allocations between two Arrow securities in one setting and between safe and risky assets in another. We observe that choices are consistent within each setting but largely inconsistent across settings. This inconsistency is partially due to a diversification heuristic and can be reduced by framing the two settings similarly, though not by further lowering the probability of the securities. Our study links revealed preference analysis and heuristic-based decision-making, offering new insights into behavioral consistency across different contexts.