Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: Uncertainty Equivalents

该奖项资助了一系列选择实验，测试引发个人风险偏好的新方法。 这些方法是从一种创新理论发展而来的，这种理论是关于如何模拟人们在确定性和不确定性相结合的情况下做出决策的方式。 如果这些方法被证明具有预测能力，这将是支持新理论的证据。新理论从对广泛观察到的行为的一般观察开始，这些行为不符合经济学家过去广泛使用的预期效用模型。 阿莱悖论、前景理论概率加权和小国风险规避都出现在确定性和不确定性相结合的情况下。 这里的关键思想是建立两个不同的效用函数来表示偏好：确定性函数和不确定性函数。 实际行为偏离预期效用的方式可能是由确定效用和不确定效用之间的差异驱动的。该奖项还资助了一项关于保险市场如何受到可能的模糊厌恶影响的实验。该项目的更广泛影响包括跨学科影响。 从公共卫生到政治科学的广泛科学家现在都在使用行为经济学的工具。 政策制定者发现，这种决策模型提出了有效实现政策目标的新方法。 如果新理论得到这些实验的支持，它应该很快被这些社区所采用。

This award funds a series of choice experiments that test new methods for eliciting individual risk preferences. These methods have been developed from an innovative theory about how to model the way people make decisions in situations when certainty and uncertainty are combined. If the methods prove to have predictive power, this will be evidence in support of the new theory.The new theory starts with a general observation about widely observed behavior that does not fit the expected utility models widely used in the past by economists. The Allais paradox, prospect theory probability weighting, and small states risk aversion all arise in situations when certainty and uncertainty are combined. The key idea here is to model two different utility functions to represent preferences: a certainty function and an uncertainty function. The ways that actual behavior deviate from expected utility may be driven by differences between certain and uncertain utility.The award also funds an experiment on how markets for insurance are affected by possible ambiguity aversion.The broader impacts of this project include the interdisciplinary impact. A wide range of scientists from public health to political science are now using tools from behavioral economics. Policy makers are finding that this kind of decision modelling suggests new ways to reach policy goals in an effective way. If the new theory is supported by these experiments, it should be rapidly adopted by these communities.