Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: Convex Preferences Over Lotteries

该奖项资助了coPI将进行的研究，作为他博士论文的一部分。他将在实验室环境中进行决策实验。目的是测试参与者的行为是否符合经济理论预测的特定方式。coPI将使用一种新的实验设计来检验从行为经济学中使用的不同风险选择模型中得出的假设。这种新设计更强大，而且不需要其他实验设计所需要的特定假设。这些实验可以用于调查各种各样的问题，从决策的长期制定到利他主义对经济决策的影响。该项目将帮助我们更好地理解人们如何做出重要的经济决策。研究结果可以提高我们对如何鼓励美国人为退休做计划和为社区做贡献的理解。该项目旨在测试风险下决策的竞争理论，这些理论是标准预期效用理论的替代理论。coPI计划使用启发和测试程序从凸彩票空间中获取选择。这种设计将使他能够区分不同的理论。该设计在概率单纯形中引出无差异曲线的凸下轮廓集。这是可行的，因为可以在这个空间的“预算线”的概率单纯形中研究彩票偏好的许多属性。这些实验将检验代理人是否严格地喜欢更多的奖品而不是更少的奖品，因此，它们将提供新的证据，证明严格的准腔是否是关于个人对彩票偏好的合理假设。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 award funds research that the coPI will undertake as part of his doctoral dissertation. He will conduct decision making experiments in a laboratory environment. The goal is to test whether the participants behave in the specific ways predicted by economic theory. The coPI will use a new experimental design to test hypotheses drawn from different models of choice under risk that are used in behavioral economics. This new design has more power and does not require specific assumptions that are needed by other experimental designs. The experiments can be adapted to investigate a wide variety of issues, from decision making over time to the effect of altruism on economic decisions. The project will help us better understand how people make important economic decisions. The results could improve our understanding of how to encourage Americans to plan for retirement and contribute to their communities.The project seeks to test competing theories of decision making under risk, theories that are alternatives to the standard expected utility theory. The coPI plans to use an elicitation and testing procedure to acquire choices from a convex lottery space. The design will allow him to discriminate between competing theories. The design elicits the convex lower contour set of indifference curves in the probability simplex. This works because many properties of preferences over lotteries can be studied in the probability simplex with "budget lines" in this space. The experiments will test to see whether or not agents strictly prefer more prizes to fewer prizes, and therefore they will provide new evidence on whether or not strict quasiconcavity is a reasonable assumption on individual preferences over lotteries.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.