New Measures of Preferences: Risk, Time, Beliefs, and Social Image

这个项目探讨了个人决策的四个领域：风险选择，时间选择，关于概率分布的报告信念，以及对个人社会形象的关注。这四个部分通过构建新的方法来衡量和估计偏好而联系在一起。在风险方面，我们要求受试者通过放弃一定的获胜概率来增加奖金，从而构建一个最喜欢的赌博。随着时间的推移，我们会改变回报，时间延迟和获得报酬的可能性，并要求个人在“更早”或“更晚”获得报酬之间进行多样化。“为了引出信念，我们采用了一种新的评分规则，这种规则简单而透明，往往会导致更多的更新行为。最后，关于社会形象，我们打算表明，当一个人的选择可能会产生一些道德后果时，考虑的一个基本特征是在他人心目中创造的形象。所有这些问题都是通过新的简单技术来解决的，这些技术往往会产生比经济学家和决策科学家过去使用的许多其他技术更符合新古典选择模型的数据。总之，这些项目提出了一种新的方法来衡量经济学分析的基础：偏好和信念。在这个过程中，我们更深入地了解了大脑如何处理复杂的个人和社会决策。这项研究将为经济学家和决策理论家提供新的工具，提高他们工作的可靠性和准确性。政策制定者将有新的信息用于评估影响时间和风险的计划。制度和机制设计者将更深入地了解如何纳入和利用社会动机来提高绩效和效率。

This project explores four areas of individual decision making: choices over risk, choices over time, reporting beliefs about probability distributions, and concern for one 's social-image. The four sections are tied together by constructing new ways to measure and estimate preferences. With risk, we ask subjects to construct a most preferred gamble by trading away some probability of winning for an increase in the prize. For choices over time, we vary the returns, time delays, and likelihood of getting paid and ask individuals to diversify across receiving payment "earlier" or "later." For eliciting beliefs, we employ a new scoring rule that is simple and transparent and tends to result in more updating behavior. Finally, with social image we intend to show that when a person's choices may have some moral consequences, an essential feature of the deliberations is the image created in the minds of others. All of these issues are addressed with new and simple techniques that tend to produce data that is more in line with neoclassical models of choice than many other techniques employed by economists and decision scientists in the past.In summary, the projects presents a new methodology for measuring the foundations of economics analysis: preferences and beliefs. In the process we gain a deeper understanding of how the mind approaches complex individual and social decisions. This research will provide economists and decision theorists with new instruments that will improve the reliability and accuracy of their work. Policy makers will have new information to use in evaluating programs that affect time and risk. Institution and mechanism designers will have a deeper understanding of how to incorporate and use social motives to improve performance and efficiency.