Collaborative Research: Caution and Reference Effects

了解我们如何做出决策对于预测经济结果和设计最佳政策至关重要。几十年的研究记录了人们如何经常偏离理性，并倾向于遵循特定的行为模式。其中三种模式已经被广泛记录，并且在经济学中特别重要：禀赋效应（所有权行为增加了人们与商品相关的价值），损失厌恶（倾向于避免损失而不是获得同等收益）和确定性效应（倾向于无风险选择，违反预期效用理论）。这三种现象在许多情况下都发挥着重要作用，包括投资、医疗和教育决策。在这个项目中，研究团队引入了一种新方法，将这三种现象联合起来研究，认为它们源于一个单一的直觉：它表明，这三种现象都可能源于这样一个事实，即个人有时不确定自己喜欢什么，并谨慎行事。这种方法对这些现象之间的关系做出了新颖的预测，并提供了一种新的工具来组织现有的经验证据。研究小组还将进行一项实验来检验这一理论的新预测。这个项目的结果可能会让我们对如何鼓励人们为退休储蓄和保护他们的健康有新的见解。研究小组想要证明，上述三种现象（禀赋效应、损失厌恶和确定性效应）都被谨慎效用模型所捕获。在这个模型中，个人有一组效用函数——好像不确定该使用哪一个——并采用最悲观的一个来评估每个选项。该项目表明，谨慎效用模型的公理化特征是强加了预期效用独立性公理的（已知的）弱化，该公理排除了确定性效应的对立面。然后表明，该模型隐含损失厌恶和禀赋效应，排除了相反的情况。这在这些现象之间建立了强有力的理论联系。他们还将展示该模型如何用于组织现有的经验证据，包括与主要替代模型不一致的观察结果。最后，他们计划进行一项实验，以测试谨慎效用模型对这些现象之间经验关系的关键新预测。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。

Understanding how we make decisions is essential to predict economic outcomes and to design optimal policy. Decades of research documented how people often deviate from rationality and tend to do so following specific behavioral patterns. Three of these patterns have been widely documented and are of particular importance in economics: the endowment effect (where the act of ownership increases the value that people associate to a good), loss aversion (the tendency to avoid losses over achieving equivalent gains), and the certainty effect (a bias towards risk-free options, in violation of Expected Utility theory). All three phenomena have been shown to play prominent roles in many contexts, including investment, medical, and educational decisions. In this project, the research teams introduce a new approach to study all three phenomena jointly as stemming from one single intuition: it suggests that all three can originate from the fact that individuals are sometimes unsure of what they prefer and act with caution. This approach makes novel predictions about the relationship of these phenomena and offers a novel tool to organize existing empirical evidence. The team will also conduct also conduct an experiment to test the new predictions of this theory. The results of this project may give us new insights into how to encourage people to save for retirement and protect their health.The research team wants to demonstrate that all three phenomena above (the endowment effect, loss aversion, and the certainty effect) are captured jointly by the Cautious Utility model. In this model, the individual has a set of utility functions—as if unsure of which one to use—and adopts the most pessimistic one to evaluate each option. The project shows that the Cautious Utility model is characterized axiomatically from imposing a (known) weakening of the independence axiom of Expected Utility that rules out the opposite of the certainty effect. It then shows that this model implies loss aversion and the endowment effect—ruling out the opposite. This establishes a strong theoretical link between these phenomena. They will also show how this model can be used to organize existing empirical evidence, including observations at odds with leading alternative models. Finally, they plan an experiment that tests the critical novel predictions of the Cautious Utility model on the empirical relationship between these phenomena.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.