Incomplete Preferences, Stochastic Choice, And Time And Risk Preferences

多年来，研究人们如何做出决策的经济学家一直假设，如果一个人面临在不同选择之间的选择，他或她可以将选项从“最喜欢的”到“最不喜欢的”排序，以及许多其他假设。然而，现在有大量证据表明，这一理论不能解释有多少人做出了某些特定类型的决定--例如，一个人愿意为一件物品支付的最高价格往往低于他或她愿意接受的没有同一物品的最低价格。这一奖项将资助PI基于个人可能无法比较所有选项的想法，继续努力开发替代行为模式；换句话说，人们有不完全的偏好。PI计划考虑这一理论是否以及如何解释一系列文件决策行为。他还计划在实验室环境中进行决策实验，以检验从该理论得出的假设。研究结果将促进我们对这类人类决策的科学理解，并可能对需要预测个人对新产品和政策的反应的企业和政府有用。研究将专注于开发一个模型，在该模型中，受试者的偏好可能是不完全的，并使用该模型来分析决策中的几个具体偏差：接受意愿和支付意愿之间的差距、确定性效应、随机环境中的决策和跨期选择。其目标是提供受试者选择随机化的模型的公理特征，包括一种特殊情况，其中随机化的愿望来自于代理人对其自身消费效用的不确定性。该项目还将包括对彩票偏好的研究，而不是对消费流的偏好，并将引入一条公理，以捕捉人们对消费随时间变化的厌恶。

Economists who study how people make decisions have for many years started from the assumption that if an individual is faced with a choice between different alternatives, he or she can order the options from "most preferred" to "least preferred", as well as a number of other assumptions. However, a wide range of evidence now demonstrates that this theory is not able to explain how many people make certain specific kinds of decisions -- for example, the highest price someone is willing to pay for an object is often lower than the lowest price he or she is willing to accept to go without the same object. This award will fund the PI's continued efforts to develop alternative models of behavior based on the idea that individuals may not be able to compare all options; in other words, people have incomplete preferences. The PI plans to consider whether and how this theory can account for a range of document decision making behaviors. He also plans to conduct decision making experiments in a lab environment to test hypotheses drawn from the theory. The results will advance our scientific understanding of this kind of human decision-making, and could be useful to businesses and governments that need to predict how individuals will respond to new products and policies.The research will focus on developing a model in which subjects' preferences may be incomplete, and using that model to analyze several specific biases in decision making: the gap between willingness to accept and willingness to pay, certainty effects, decision in stochastic environments, and intertemporal choice. The goal is to provide axiomatic characterizations of models in which subjects chose to randomize, including a special case where the desire to randomize comes from the agents' uncertainty about her own utility of consumption. The project will also include work on preferences on lotteries over consumption streams and will introduce an axiom that captures aversion to variability of consumption over time.