Ambiguous Random Variables and Menu Effects

该奖项用于研究人们如何做出决策的经济理论。该项目的第一部分将专注于人们如何在以模糊性为特征的动态情况下做出决定。当人们掌握的信息如此之少，以至于他们无法表达出不同结果的可能性有多大时，这些情况就会出现。第二个项目寻求开发一个模型，该模型将预测心理学家和行为经济学家所称的菜单效应。当个人可用的选择(所谓的“菜单”)以与标准经济理论不一致的方式影响他/她的决定时，就会出现这种情况。这个项目有助于国家利益，因为了解这些经济背景下的个人决策将有助于其他研究人员为管理实践和公共政策开发新的见解，使美国公众受益。这项研究的重点是歧义和菜单效果。第一部分提出了一种新的条件概率和条件期望理论(称为评价)，适用于分析模糊条件下的动态选择问题。它为歧义条件下的信念修正提供了新的基础，并通过对评价算子的限制来刻画这一更新规则。现有的动态模糊模型倾向于限制条件性事件的集合，这限制了对涉及昂贵信息获取的问题的适用性。新的模型允许信息以每种可能的顺序到达，并识别一个新的参数，允许在静态情况下具有相同行为的决策者在面对动态问题时采取不同的行为。第二个项目提供了一个分析菜单效应的框架，特别是吸引力、折衷和天赋效应。目标是一个模型，证明各种观察到的与标准消费者理论的偏差可以来自一个共同的潜在来源：代理人无法根据特定问题调整他或她的选择行为。分析揭示了三种菜单效应的共同特征(原因)。

This award funds research in the economic theory of how people make decisions. The first part of the project will focus on how people make decisions in dynamic situations characterized by ambiguity. These situations arise when people have so little information that they cannot formulate ideas of how likely different outcomes are. The second project seeks to develop a model that will predict what psychologists and behavior economists call menu effects. These occur when the choices available to an individual (the so-called 'menu') affects his/her decision in ways that are not consistent with standard economic theory. This project contributes to national interest because understanding individual decision making in these economic contexts will help other researchers develop new insights for management practice and public policy that will benefit the U.S. public. The research focuses on ambiguity and on menu effects. The first part offers a new theory of conditional probability and conditional expectation (called evaluation) suitable for the analysis of dynamic choice problems under ambiguity. It develops a new foundation for belief revision under ambiguity and will characterize this updating rule by imposing restrictions on the evaluation operator. Existing dynamic ambiguity models tend to restrict the set of conditioning events, and this limits applicability to problems that involve costly information acquisition. The new model permits information to arrive in every possible order and identifies a new parameter allows decision makers with identical behavior in static situations to behave differently when facing dynamic problems. The second project provides a framework for analyzing menu effects, in particular attraction, compromise, and endowment effects. The goal is a model demonstrating that a variety of observed deviations from standard consumer theory can be derived from a common underlying source: the agent's inability to tailor his or her choice behavior to the specific problem. The analysis reveals common features (causes) of each of the three menu effects.