Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: Uncertainty Equivalents

经济学博士论文研究：不确定性等价物

• 批准号: 1024683
• 负责人: James Andreoni
• 金额: $ 1.85万
• 依托单位: University of California-San Diego
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2010
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2010-09-01 至 2012-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1024683&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Economics; Uncertainty

This award funds a series of choice experiments that test new methods for eliciting individual risk preferences. These methods have been developed from an innovative theory about how to model the way people make decisions in situations when certainty and uncertainty are combined. If the methods prove to have predictive power, this will be evidence in support of the new theory.The new theory starts with a general observation about widely observed behavior that does not fit the expected utility models widely used in the past by economists. The Allais paradox, prospect theory probability weighting, and small states risk aversion all arise in situations when certainty and uncertainty are combined. The key idea here is to model two different utility functions to represent preferences: a certainty function and an uncertainty function. The ways that actual behavior deviate from expected utility may be driven by differences between certain and uncertain utility.The award also funds an experiment on how markets for insurance are affected by possible ambiguity aversion.The broader impacts of this project include the interdisciplinary impact. A wide range of scientists from public health to political science are now using tools from behavioral economics. Policy makers are finding that this kind of decision modelling suggests new ways to reach policy goals in an effective way. If the new theory is supported by these experiments, it should be rapidly adopted by these communities.

该奖项资助了一系列选择实验，以测试引发个人风险偏好的新方法。这些方法是从一个创新的理论发展而来的，这个理论是关于如何对人们在确定性和不确定性相结合的情况下做出决策的方式进行建模的。如果这些方法被证明具有预测能力，这将是支持新理论的证据。新理论从对广泛观察到的行为的一般观察开始，这些行为不符合经济学家过去广泛使用的预期实用模型。在确定性和不确定性相结合的情况下，会出现阿莱悖论、前景理论概率加权和小国家风险厌恶等问题。这里的关键思想是建模两个不同的效用函数来表示偏好：确定性函数和不确定性函数。实际行为偏离预期效用的方式可能是由确定效用和不确定效用之间的差异驱动的。该奖项还资助了一项关于保险市场如何受到可能的模糊性厌恶的影响的实验。这个项目更广泛的影响包括跨学科的影响。从公共卫生到政治科学的众多科学家现在都在使用行为经济学的工具。政策制定者发现，这种决策模型为有效实现政策目标提供了新的途径。如果新理论得到这些实验的支持，它应该很快被这些社区所采用。