Ambiguous Random Variables and Menu Effects

该奖项资助人们如何做出决策的经济理论研究。该项目的第一部分将侧重于人们如何在模糊的动态情况下做出决策。当人们所掌握的信息太少，以至于他们无法对不同结果的可能性形成概念时，就会出现这种情况。第二个项目旨在开发一个模型，预测心理学家和行为经济学家所说的菜单效应。当个人可用的选择（所谓的“菜单”）以与标准经济理论不一致的方式影响他/她的决定时，就会发生这种情况。该项目有助于国家利益，因为了解这些经济背景下的个人决策将有助于其他研究人员为管理实践和公共政策制定新的见解，这将有利于美国公众。研究的重点是歧义和菜单效应。第一部分提出了一种新的条件概率和条件期望（称为评价）理论，适用于分析模糊性下的动态选择问题。它开发了一个新的基础下模糊的信念修订，并将通过对评估算子施加限制来表征这种更新规则。现有的动态模糊度模型倾向于限制条件事件的集合，并且这限制了涉及昂贵的信息获取的问题的适用性。新模型允许信息以每一种可能的顺序到达，并确定一个新的参数，允许决策者在静态情况下具有相同的行为，在面对动态问题时表现不同。第二个项目提供了一个分析菜单效应的框架，特别是吸引力，妥协和禀赋效应。我们的目标是一个模型，证明各种观察到的偏离标准消费者理论可以来自一个共同的基本来源：代理人的无法定制他或她的选择行为的具体问题。分析揭示了三种菜单效应的共同特征（原因）。

This award funds research in the economic theory of how people make decisions. The first part of the project will focus on how people make decisions in dynamic situations characterized by ambiguity. These situations arise when people have so little information that they cannot formulate ideas of how likely different outcomes are. The second project seeks to develop a model that will predict what psychologists and behavior economists call menu effects. These occur when the choices available to an individual (the so-called 'menu') affects his/her decision in ways that are not consistent with standard economic theory. This project contributes to national interest because understanding individual decision making in these economic contexts will help other researchers develop new insights for management practice and public policy that will benefit the U.S. public. The research focuses on ambiguity and on menu effects. The first part offers a new theory of conditional probability and conditional expectation (called evaluation) suitable for the analysis of dynamic choice problems under ambiguity. It develops a new foundation for belief revision under ambiguity and will characterize this updating rule by imposing restrictions on the evaluation operator. Existing dynamic ambiguity models tend to restrict the set of conditioning events, and this limits applicability to problems that involve costly information acquisition. The new model permits information to arrive in every possible order and identifies a new parameter allows decision makers with identical behavior in static situations to behave differently when facing dynamic problems. The second project provides a framework for analyzing menu effects, in particular attraction, compromise, and endowment effects. The goal is a model demonstrating that a variety of observed deviations from standard consumer theory can be derived from a common underlying source: the agent's inability to tailor his or her choice behavior to the specific problem. The analysis reveals common features (causes) of each of the three menu effects.