Incomplete Preferences, Stochastic Choice, And Time And Risk Preferences

不完全偏好、随机选择以及时间和风险偏好

• 批准号: 1763326
• 负责人: Pietro Ortoleva
• 金额: $ 25.94万
• 依托单位: Princeton University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2017-07-01 至 2021-03-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1763326&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Incomplete; Preferences; Stochastic; Choice; Time

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.

多年来，研究人们如何做决策的经济学家都是从这样一个假设开始的，即如果一个人面临着在不同的选择中做出选择，他或她可以从“最喜欢”到“最不喜欢”排列选项，以及一些其他假设。然而，现在有大量证据表明，这一理论无法解释有多少人会做出某些特定的决定--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最低价格。该奖项将资助PI继续努力开发基于个人可能无法比较所有选项的替代行为模型;换句话说，人们有不完整的偏好。PI计划考虑该理论是否以及如何解释一系列文档决策行为。他还计划在实验室环境中进行决策实验，以测试从理论中得出的假设。研究结果将推进我们对这种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，其中受试者的偏好可能是不完整的，并使用该模型分析决策中的几种特定偏见：接受意愿与支付意愿之间的差距、确定性效应、随机环境下的决策以及跨期选择。我们的目标是提供公理化的模型中，受试者选择随机化，包括一个特殊的情况下，随机化的愿望来自代理人的不确定性，她自己的效用消费。该项目还将包括对彩票消费流的偏好的研究，并将引入一个公理，以捕捉对消费随时间变化的厌恶。