Many information structures generate correlated rather than mutually independent signals, the news media being a prime example. This paper shows experimentally that in such context many people neglect these correlations in the updating process and treat correlated information as independent. In...

The prior paper in this sequel, Pope (2009) introduced the concept of a nominalist heuristic, defined as a focus on prominent numbers, indices or ratios. In this paper the concept is used to show three things in how scientists and practitioners analyse and evaluate to decide (conclude). First,...

This experiment explores whether individuals know that other people are biased. We confirm that overestimation of abilities is a pervasive problem, but observe that most people are not aware of it, i.e. they think others are unbiased. We investigate several explanations for this result. As a...

We report an experiment on a decision task by SAMUELSON and BAZERMAN (1985). Subjects submit a bid for an item with an unknown value. A winner s curse phenomenon arises when subjects bid too high and make losses. Learning direction theory can account for this. However, other influences on...