Either in the form of nature’s wrath or a pandemic, catastrophes cause major destructions in societies, thus requiring policy and decision makers to take urgent action by evaluating a host of interdependent parameters, and possible scenarios. The primary purpose of this pa-per is to propose a...

We consider a standard one-agent decision-making problem under risk and we address the following question: under what conditions is utility maximization equivalent to 'risk' minimization, where the measure of risk used by the decision-maker is a conservative coherent risk measure?

The paper proves that the Bayesian approach to learning and expectations formation implies no propositions that could conceivably be refuted by observation. For a (non-expanding) universe infinite in time but finite at any point of time, it is shown that by a suitable choice of priors, any...

This paper is concerned with the role of committees in collective decision-makingprocesses in a world where agents must be motivated to collect information. Committees improvethe quality of decision-making by providing information and by coordinating the collection ofinformation. We address two...

We study Nature's trade-off when endowing people with the cognitive ability to distinguish between different time periods or different prizes. Our key premise is that cognitive ability is a scarce resource, to be deployed only where and when it really matters. We show that this simple insight...

In the wake of growing awareness, decision makers anticipate that they might become aware of material possibilities and ideas that, in their current state of ignorance, are unimaginable. This anticipation manifests itself in their choice behavior. This paper models this awareness of unawareness...

Prior research suggests that those who rely on intuition rather than effortful reasoning when making decisions are less averse to risk and ambiguity. The evidence is largely correlational, however, leaving open the question of the direction of causality. In this paper, we present experimental...

I experimentally examine whether feedback about others' choices provides an anchor for decision-making under ambiguity. In a between-subjects design I vary whether subjects learn choices made individually by a "peer" in a first part when facing the same task a second time, and whether prospects...

This paper analyzes 12,596 wagering decisions of 6,064 contestants in the US game show Jeopardy!, focusing on the anchoring phenomenon in financial decision-making. We find that contestants anchor heavily on the initial dollar value of a clue in their wagering decision, even though there exists...