Showing 1 - 10 of 113
Following Kreps (1979), I consider a decision maker who is uncertain about her future taste. This uncertainty leaves the decision maker with a preference for flexibility: When choosing among menus containing alternatives for future choice, she weakly prefers menus with additional alternatives....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011599490
Motivated by the literature on ``choice overload'', we study a boundedly rational agent whose choice behavior admits a \textit{monotone threshold representation}: There is an underlying rational benchmark, corresponding to maximization of a utility function $v$, from which the agent's choices...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011599584
Among the reasons behind the choice behavior of an individual taking a stochastic form are her potential indifference or indecisiveness between certain alternatives, and/or her willingness to experiment in the sense of occasionally deviating from choosing a best alternative in order to give a...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014536935
Considerable evidence shows that people have optimistic beliefs about future outcomes. I present an axiomatic model of wishful thinking (WT), in which an endowed alternative, or status quo, influences the agent's beliefs over states and thus induces such optimism. I introduce a behavioral axiom...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013188993
I propose an axiomatic framework for belief revision when new information is qualitative, of the form "event A is at least as likely as event B." My decision maker need not have beliefs about the joint distribution of the signal she will receive and the payoff-relevant states. I propose three...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013189088
Following Kreps (1979), I consider a decision maker who is uncertain about her future taste. This uncertainty leaves the decision maker with a preference for flexibility: When choosing among menus containing alternatives for future choice, she weakly prefers menus with additional alternatives....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010659473
When is a finite number of binary voting choices consistent with the hypothesis that the voter has preferences that admit a (quasi)concave utility representation? I derive necessary and sufficient conditions and a tractable algorithm to verify their validity. I show that the hypothesis that the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011599425
Among the most important and robust violations of rationality are the attraction and the compromise effects. The compromise effect refers to the tendency of individuals to choose an intermediate option in a choice set, while the attraction effect refers to the tendency to choose an option that...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011599458
In 1908 the Welsh neurologist and psychoanlayst Ernest Jones described human beings as rationalizers whose behavior is governed by "the necessity of providing an explanation." We construct a formal and testable model of rationalization in which a decision maker selects her preferred alternative...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011599499
We study two-stage choice procedures in which the decision maker first preselects the alternatives whose values according to a criterion pass a menu-dependent threshold, and then maximizes a second criterion to narrow the selection further. This framework overlaps with several existing models...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011599502