We develop interpretable, quantitative indices of the objective and subjective complexity of lottery choice problems that can be computed for any standard dataset. These indices capture the predicted error rate in identifying the lottery with the highest expected value, where the predictions are...

This paper studies the relevance of cognitive uncertainty - subjective uncertainty over one’s utility-maximizing action - for understanding and predicting intertemporal choice. The main idea is that when people are cognitively noisy, such as when a decision is complex, they implicitly treat...

This paper introduces a formal definition and an experimental measurement of the concept of cognitive uncertainty: people's subjective uncertainty about what the optimal action is. This concept allows us to bring together and partially explain a set of behavioral anomalies identified across four...

Ambiguous prospects are ubiquitous in social and economic life, but the psychological foundations of behavior under ambiguity are still not well understood. One of the most robust empirical regularities is the strong correlation between attitudes towards ambiguity and compound risk which...

We investigate whether violations of canonical axioms of choice under risk are mistakes or a manifestation of true preferences. First, we elicit axiom and gamble preferences and then allow subjects to revise their potentially conflicting preferences. Among the behavioral patterns that allow for...

We conduct an incentivized experiment on a nationally representative US sample (N=708) to test whether people prefer to avoid ambiguity even when it means choosing dominated options. In contrast to the literature, we find that 55% of subjects prefer a risky act to an ambiguous act that always...

This study measures the differences in ambiguity attitudes of groups and individuals in the gain and loss domain. We elicit the ambiguity attitudes and ambiguity-generated insensitivity for natural temperature events. We do not find significant differences between individuals and groups in our...

We formulate a simple quantum decision model of the Ellsberg paradox. We report the results of an experiment we performed to test the matching probabilities predicted by this model using an incentive compatible method. We find that the theoretical predictions of the model are in conformity with...

We propose a model of instrumental belief choice under loss aversion. When new information arrives, an agent is prompted to abandon her prior. However, potential posteriors may induce her to take actions that generate a lower utility in some states than actions induced by her prior. These losses...

This paper proposes a simple framework to model contextual influences on procedural decision making. In terms of utility, we differentiate between monetary payoffs and contextual psychological ones, e.g. deriving from the subjects’ normative frame of reference. Monetary payoffs are treated as...