Essays in Decision Making

Essays in Decision Making
Author: Mark H Karwan
Publisher:
Total Pages: 440
Release: 1996-12-13
Genre:
ISBN: 9783642606649

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Essays on Decision Making

Essays on Decision Making
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2008
Genre: Decision making
ISBN:

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The three essays in this dissertation examine individual decision making from a behavioral economics perspective. The first two essays report the results of an experiment that examine bidding behavior and belief formation in market-like environments with common values. In the first essay, using elicited beliefs of bidders on the value of the object at different stages of bidding, I examine whether information cascades and rational herding can be credited for the occurrence of the 'winners' curse' I find that the role of information cascades in the occurrence of the winner's curse is marginal and bidders tend to give more weight to private information in making the bidding decisions. The winner's curse is caused primarily by herding due to disconfirmation bias and conservatism in updating beliefs. In the second essay, I extend the analysis to understand heuristics and biases like confirmation bias, disconfirmation bias, conservatism and overreaction exhibited by decision makers in the formation of subjective beliefs. The results show hardly any evidence for Bayesian updating by the bidders. Confirmation bias, disconfirmation bias and heuristics like conservatism and are observed in the formation of beliefs but are sensitive to treatment conditions. Non-optimal belief formation due to upwardly biased prior beliefs and conservatism in updating beliefs are responsible for overbidding in markets with sequential bids and common values. Another important finding is that Perfect Bayesian equilibrium behavior is consistent with the presence of biases and heuristics. The third essay estimates a series of random parameter logit models of the college-to-work migration decisions of technology graduates and holders of doctorates within the United States. I employ detailed information on the migration-relevant characteristics of individuals, as well as on their actual origins and destinations at the metropolitan scale. The results demonstrate that science and technology graduates migrate to better educated places, other things equal; that PhD graduates pay greater attention to amenity characteristics than other degree holders; and that foreign students from some immigrant groups migrate to places where those groups are concentrated.

Essays In Decision Making

Essays In Decision Making
Author: Mark Mark
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 429
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3642606636

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The pioneering study by Bowman [1980) reawakened interest in risk and return relations in the strategic management literature. We do not examine this literature here because we have elsewhere reviewed it in detail 1 and because, for the most part, these studies have been confined to ex post data. Discussions of the strategies which subjects used to direct their ex ante evaluations of risks and returns have either been omitted or else have been only indirectly inferred from ex post data. In addition, with few exceptions, this literature does not attempt to ascertain the meanings that might have been assigned by subjects to terms like "risk" and/or the "returns" with which they have been concerned. Even fewer of these studies have attempted to ascertain how the subjects implemented their definitions en of prospective strategies. Thus, tius literature may route to arriving at evaluations best be regarded as bearing only indirect relations to the present study which is concerned not only with the meanings assigned to terms like "risk" and "return" but also with how these terms are used in arriving at risk and return evaluations of proposed strategies as well as how they are measured and used, on an ex ante basis en route to seeing how these evaluations match with ex post performance. In a sense, one part of this study--i. e.

On Science, Inference, Information and Decision-Making

On Science, Inference, Information and Decision-Making
Author: A. Szaniawski
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 268
Release: 1998-09-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780792349228

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There are two competing pictures of science. One considers science as a system of inferences, whereas another looks at science as a system of actions. The essays included in this collection offer a view which intends to combine both pictures. This compromise is well illustrated by Szaniawski's analysis of statistical inferences. It is shown that traditional approaches to the foundations of statistics do not need to be regarded as conflicting with each other. Thus, statistical rules can be treated as rules of behaviour as well as rules of inference. Szaniawski's uniform approach relies on the concept of rationality, analyzed from the point of view of decision theory. Applications of formal tools to the problem of justice and division of goods shows that the concept of rationality has a wider significance. Audience: The book will be of interest to philosophers of science, logicians, ethicists and mathematicians.

Dynamic Perspectives on Managerial Decision Making

Dynamic Perspectives on Managerial Decision Making
Author: Herbert Dawid
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 518
Release: 2016-09-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3319391208

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This volume collects research papers addressing topical issues in economics and management with a particular focus on dynamic models which allow to analyze and foster the decision making of firms in dynamic complex environments. The scope of the contributions ranges from daily operational challenges firms face to strategic choices in dynamic industry environments and the analysis of optimal growth paths. The volume also highlights recent methodological developments in the areas of dynamic optimization, dynamic games and meta-heuristics, which help to improve our understanding of (optimal) decision making in a fast evolving economy.

Social and Economic Factors in Decision Making under Uncertainty

Social and Economic Factors in Decision Making under Uncertainty
Author: Kinga Posadzy
Publisher: Linköping University Electronic Press
Total Pages: 16
Release: 2017-11-16
Genre:
ISBN: 9176854213

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The objective of this thesis is to improve the understanding of human behavior that goes beyond monetary rewards. In particular, it investigates social influences in individual’s decision making in situations that involve coordination, competition, and deciding for others. Further, it compares how monetary and social outcomes are perceived. The common theme of all studies is uncertainty. The first four essays study individual decisions that have uncertain consequences, be it due to the actions of others or chance. The last essay, in turn, uses the advances in research on decision making under uncertainty to predict behavior in riskless choices. The first essay, Fairness Versus Efficiency: How Procedural Fairness Concerns Affect Coordination, investigates whether preferences for fair rules undermine the efficiency of coordination mechanisms that put some individuals at a disadvantage. The results from a laboratory experiment show that the existence of coordination mechanisms, such as action recommendations, increases efficiency, even if one party is strongly disadvantaged by the mechanism. Further, it is demonstrated that while individuals’ behavior does not depend on the fairness of the coordination mechanism, their beliefs about people’s behavior do. The second essay, Dishonesty and Competition. Evidence from a stiff competition environment, explores whether and how the possibility to behave dishonestly affects the willingness to compete and who the winner is in a competition between similarly skilled individuals. We do not find differences in competition entry between competitions in which dishonesty is possible and in which it is not. However, we find that due to the heterogeneity in propensity to behave dishonestly, around 20% of winners are not the best-performing individuals. This implies that the efficient allocation of resources cannot be ensured in a stiff competition in which behavior is unmonitored. The third essay, Tracing Risky Decision Making for Oneself and Others: The Role of Intuition and Deliberation, explores how individuals make choices under risk for themselves and on behalf of other people. The findings demonstrate that while there are no differences in preferences for taking risks when deciding for oneself and for others, individuals have greater decision error when choosing for other individuals. The differences in the decision error can be partly attributed to the differences in information processing; individuals employ more deliberative cognitive processing when deciding for themselves than when deciding for others. Conducting more information processing when deciding for others is related to the reduction in decision error. The fourth essay, The Effect of Decision Fatigue on Surgeons’ Clinical Decision Making, investigates how mental depletion, caused by a long session of decision making, affects surgeon’s decision to operate. Exploiting a natural experiment, we find that surgeons are less likely to schedule an operation for patients who have appointment late during the work shift than for patients who have appointment at the beginning of the work shift. Understanding how the quality of medical decisions depends on when the patient is seen is important for achieving both efficiency and fairness in health care, where long shifts are popular. The fifth essay, Preferences for Outcome Editing in Monetary and Social Contexts, compares whether individuals use the same rules for mental representation of monetary outcomes (e.g., purchases, expenses) as for social outcomes (e.g., having nice time with friends). Outcome editing is an operation in mental accounting that determines whether individuals prefer to first combine multiple outcomes before their evaluation (integration) or evaluate each outcome separately (segregation). I find that the majority of individuals express different preferences for outcome editing in the monetary context than in the social context. Further, while the results on the editing of monetary outcomes are consistent with theoretical predictions, no existing model can explain the editing of social outcomes.

Essays on Decision-making in Environments of Uncertainty

Essays on Decision-making in Environments of Uncertainty
Author: Alexander Peterhansl
Publisher:
Total Pages: 155
Release: 2007
Genre:
ISBN: 9780549056232

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The third part concerns a class of problems in non-cooperative game theory that is subject to multiple, Pareto-ranked equilibria, where decision makers are faced with strategic uncertainty. I investigate how intervention strategies based on a Schelling-inspired tipping mechanism can efficiently alter the incentives of a small subset of individuals to trigger system-wide coordination on the Pareto-superior outcome. I then apply this framework to two examples, the provision of airline security and reward schemes in organizations.