Behavioral Economics Commons^™

Behavioral Economics: Origins, Methodology And “Work Tools”, Daniel A. Monroy

Daniel A Monroy C

This paper has two main objectives: (i) The main objective is to propose a theoretical and methodological delimitation of the Behavioral Economics approach. In this point, the paper argues that such delimitation involves a permanent tension with the hypotheses of rational choice theory of human behavior. (ii) The secondary objective of the paper focuses on the methodology submitted, for this, we present a couple of case studies in order to explain and test such methodology. Furthermore, the case studies will allow us to determinate some work tools of the Behavioral Economics approach.

How Do You Persuade Someone You Do Not Know?, H.C. Yi

Hyun Chang Yi

We examine the potential for communication via cheap talk between an expert and a decision maker whose type (or preferences) is uncertain. The expert privately observes multiple aspects of an issue and persuades the decision maker to choose an action in his favour by informing the decision maker about the issue. The decision maker privately observes her type and chooses an action. The optimal action for the decision maker depends upon her type and the state of the issue. We find that, in one-way cheap talk games where only the expert talks, the expert can always inform the decision maker …

Voice Without Say: Why Capital-Managed Firms Aren’T (Genuinely) Participatory, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

Why are most capitalist enterprises of any size organized as authoritarian bureaucracies rather than incorporating genuine employee participation that would give the workers real authority? Even firms with employee participation programs leave virtually all decision-making power in the hands of management. The standard answer is that hierarchy is more economically efficient than any sort of genuine participation, so that participatory firms would be less productive and lose out to more traditional competitors. This answer is indefensible. After surveying the history, legal status, and varieties of employee participation, I examine and reject as question-begging the argument that the rarity of genuine …

Are People Probabilistically Challenged? Book Review Of Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast And Slow (2011), Alex Stein

Alex Stein

Daniel Kahneman’s recent book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, is a must-read for any scholar and policymaker interested in behavioral economics. Thus far, behavioral economists did predominantly experimental work that uncovered discrete manifestations of people’s bounded rationality: representativeness, availability, anchoring, overoptimism, base-rate neglect, hindsight bias, loss aversion, and other misevaluations of probability and utility. This work has developed no causal explanations for these misevaluations. Kahneman’s book takes the discipline to a different level by developing an integrated theory of bounded rationality’s causes and characteristics. This theory holds that humans use two distinct modes of reasoning, intuitive (System 1) and deliberative (System …

Learning And Risk Aversion, Carlos Oyarzun, Rajiv Sarin

Carlos Oyarzun

Abstract We study the manner in which learning shapes behavior towards risk when individuals are not assumed to know, or to have beliefs about, probability distributions. In any period, the behavior change induced by learning is assumed to depend on the action chosen and the payoff obtained. We characterize learning processes that, in expected value, increase the probability of choosing the safest (or riskiest) actions and provide sufficient conditions for them to converge, in the long run, to the choices of risk averse (or risk seeking) expected utility maximizers. We provide a learning theoretic motivation for long run risk choices, …

Adaptive Learning In Finitely Repeated Games, Naoki Funai

Naoki Funai

This paper investigates the way in which adaptive players behave in the long-run in finitely repeated games. Each player assigns subjective payoff assessments to his own actions and chooses the action which has the highest assessment at each of his information sets. After receiving payoffs, players update their own assessments of chosen actions using the realized payoffs in an adaptive manner; we consider the updating rules of Watkins and Dayan (1992) and Sarin and Vahid (1999). When players experience random shocks on their assessments, players' behavior strategies converge to a unique agent quantal response equilibrium (McKelvey and Palfrey, 1998) if …

Resource Allocation, Affluence And Deadweight Loss When Relative Consumption Matters, Jesse A. Matheson, B. Curtis Eaton

Jesse A Matheson