I use a model of human causal learning, Causal Support (Tenenbaum & Griffiths, 2001), to derive a meaningful measure of Cognitive Distance – the degree to which two people differ in their opinions about the workings of the world. Next, I amend this measure to quantify the notion of Cognitive...

The recent nonexperimental literature on social learning focuses on showing that observational learning exists, that is, individuals do indeed draw inferences by observing the actions of others. We take this literature a step further by analyzing whether individuals are Bayesian social learners....

The recovery in private business investment globally remains extremely weak more than seven years after the financial crisis. This paper contributes to the ongoing policy debate on the factors behind this weakness by analyzing the role of growth prospects and uncertainty in explaining...

The psychology literature provides ample evidence that people have difficulties taking the perspective of less-informed others. This paper presents a controlled experiment showing that this "curse of knowledge" can cause comparative overconfidence and overentry into competition. In a broader...

The psychology literature provides ample evidence that people have difficulties taking the perspective of less informed others. This paper presents a controlled experiment showing that this "curse of knowledge" can cause comparative overconfidence and overentry into competition. In a broader...

Overall, 72 subjects invest their endowment in four risky assets. Each com-bination of assets yields the same expected return and variance of returns. Illusion of expertise prevails when one prefers nevertheless the self-selected portfolio. After being randomly assigned to groups of four...

We study the impact of diverse beliefs on conduct of monetary policy. We use a New Keynesian Model solved with a quadratic approximation. Aggregation renders the belief distribution an aggregate state variable. Diverse expectations change standard results about a smooth trade-off between...

Under expected utility theory, unconditional expected utility can be decomposed into a weighted sum of conditional expected utilities where the weights are marginal probabilities. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for a similar decomposition in the framework of Cumulative Prospect...