Collaborative Research: Payoff-Belief Separable Preferences

本项目在行为经济学前沿与主流应用经济学分析之间架起一座桥梁。该团队分析并测试了个人经济决策的模型。在这个模型中，消费者、工人和投资者的信念直接影响他们的个人福祉。该研究建立了一个统一的框架，其中包括许多广泛使用的行为经济学模型作为具体案例。该团队开发了可测试的含义，可用于确定模型是否准确地描述了个体行为。他们将用这些仪器在一系列的实验室实验中检验这一新理论。他们提出的模型是效用最大化标准模型的另一种选择，当经济科学被应用于理解或预测经济结果时，效用最大化标准模型几乎被普遍使用。因此，这一新理论可以将心理学、决策科学和行为经济学的前沿见解广泛应用于主流经济分析。这种分析被州和地方政府、美国联邦政府和企业广泛使用。因此，该项目可以改善经济政策和企业在市场上竞争的能力。该项目使用决策理论来丰富对依赖于物质结果和中间信念的偏好的研究。该团队引入并分析了一类新的动态偏好，以捕获基于信念的实用程序的一般可加可分方法。本课程包含了行为经济学中已经发展起来的许多模型。基于信念的效用模型已经对医疗测试的设计、投资者如何重新平衡投资组合的分析以及其他重要应用产生了重要影响。提供新的、简单的、可测试的条件来区分不同的基于信念的经济决策动机，将有助于我们更好地理解心理过程如何影响经济决策。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project builds a bridge between the frontier of behavioral economics and mainstream applied economic analysis. The team analyzes and tests a model of individual economic decisions. In this model, the beliefs of consumers, workers, and investors directly impact their individual well-being. The research builds a unifying framework that includes many widely used models from behavioral economics as specific cases. The team develops testable implications that can be used to determine whether the models accurately describe individual behavior. They will use these to test the new theory in a series of laboratory experiments. The model they propose is an alternative to the standard model of utility maximization that is almost universally used when economic science is applied to understand or predict economic outcomes. As a result, the new theory could bring frontier insights from psychology, decision science, and behavior economics to wide adoption in mainstream economic analysis. This kind of analysis is widely used by state and local governments, the US federal government, and business. As a result, the project could improve economic policies and the ability of businesses to compete in the marketplace.The project uses decision theory to enrich the study of preferences that depend both on material outcomes and intermediate beliefs. The team introduces and analyzes a new class of dynamic preferences to capture a general additively-separable approach to belief-based utility. This class encompasses many models already developed in behavioral economics. Models of belief-based utility have demonstrated important implications for the design of medical tests, the analysis of how investors rebalance portfolios, and other important applications. Providing new, simple, and testable conditions to distinguish between different belief-based motivations for economic decisions will help us to better understand how psychological processes affect economic decisions.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.