Collaborative Research: Choosing Among Risk Alternatives: An Experimental Investigation of the Impact of Insurance Markets on Decision-Making Biases

许多关于个人决策的研究表明，人们依赖于导致系统性偏见的启发式方法。许多经济学家认为，市场力量会减少这种偏见的盛行。本研究由一系列实验组成，旨在将保险市场添加到不确定性下的决策测试中。我们解决的问题是，保险市场是否创造了一种副产品--信息--帮助人们更好地理解风险，从而做出更好的决策。例如，如果吸烟者发现购买人寿保险的价格高于不吸烟者，这可能比统计表传达的关于吸烟风险增加的信息更容易理解。我们希望，这项研究将有助于加深对个人如何处理和使用来自保险市场的信息的理解，从而加深对如何以更容易理解的方式呈现有关风险的信息的理解。

Many studies of individual decision-making have shown that people rely on heuristics that lead to systematic biases. Many economists belief that market forces decrease the prevalence of such biases. This research consists of a series of experiments that add an insurance market to tests of decision-making under uncertainty. We address the question of whether insurance markets create a byproduct - information - that helps people to better understand risk and therefore make better decisions. For example, if a smoker finds out that the price for purchasing life insurance is higher than for a non-smoker, this might convey more easily understood information about the increased risk of smoking than would statistical tables. Our hope is that this research will help increase the understanding of how individuals process and use information from insurance markets, and therefore how information about risks might be presented in a more easily understood manner.