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.

Three Essays

Three Essays
Author: Lise Vesterlund
Publisher:
Total Pages: 262
Release: 1997
Genre:
ISBN:

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Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions
Author: Dino Dominic Falaschetti
Publisher:
Total Pages: 236
Release: 1999
Genre:
ISBN:

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Essays on Economic Decision Making

Essays on Economic Decision Making
Author: Hee Chun Kim
Publisher:
Total Pages: 126
Release: 2016
Genre: Electronic dissertations
ISBN:

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My dissertation consists of three chapters and I take different approach in each chapter to investigate economic decision making behavior. The first chapter analyzes individuals' strategic decisionmaking when players have replaceable identities and private information in a repeated prisoner's dillmma game. The second chapter studies individuals' non-strategic decision making when she has incomplete information about her underlying preference in a sequential choice situation. The third chapter experimentally examines a link between an individual's strategic thinking and nonstrategic decision making in a setting designed to elicit beliefs about independent random variables. In the first chapter, I focus on strategic decision making of economic agents when they are replaceable in a repeated prisoners dilemma. I assume that agents have different private information that restricts their set of actions, and that replacement of agent involves change of such private information. In this environment, some agents are required to signal their own private information to induce their opponents cooperative response, which may induce Pareto improvement of their expected continuation payoffs. Except for a trivial equilibrium, we can have non-trivial equilibria supporting cooperative action as a part of the equilibrium play; however, different from the environment with two long-run agents, replaceable agents environment puts a restriction on an existence of the equilibrium in which agents share the risk of type uncertainty equally regardless of the past history. Because of replacement, agents can avoid a full cost of signaling by shifting it to their successor upon their own replacement. As replacement incurs such a situation with a strictly positive probability, the equilibrium cannot avoid failure. In the second chapter I focus on an economic agent's optimal decision making in a non-strategic environment. Especially, I study a sequential choice problem where an agent's preferences evolve over time. I assume that an agent has an underlying preference, and she learns about her underlying preference depending on her choice histories. Given that an agent makes an optimal decision upon her current available menu, I characterize the sequential choice behavior that follows a Sequential Weak Axiom of Revealed Preference (WARP-S). Using this characterization, I provide criteria for sequential choice data that recovers agents underlying preference. In the third chapter I and my co-author, Duk-Gyoo Kim, focus on a link between an optimal decision making in a non-strategic environment and strategic environment. Our research investigates whether an individual decision maker follows own subjective optimization in a non-strategic decision making, and such a difference in subjective optimization is correlated with strategic decision making pattern. We conducted two separate sessions in the same subject. Each session is designed to identify subjects' behavioral pattern in strategic and non-strategic decision making environment respectively. From the data, we observed that subjects behavioral pattern shows significant similarity in two sessions.