Biased Beliefs and Social Interactions

该奖项资助经济理论方面的研究，该研究考察有偏见的看法和信念的决定因素和影响。这项提议有三个组成部分。前两项研究在社会互动的背景下有偏见的认知。该团队尤其感兴趣的是，当人们只与没有代表性的人群样本互动时，可能会产生什么样的社会误解，以及这种误解如何影响人们从社交中学习的能力。第三个部分关注的是一种可能影响个人决策的偏见，称为信念扭曲。这项研究将给我们提供新的工具来理解和预测不确定性下的社会互动和决策的结果。这些都是理解许多经济决策的关键。因此，该项目最终可能为我们提供更好的方法来预测旨在促进国家利益的经济政策的效果。提案中的第一个项目建立并分析了具有协调动机的地方互动博弈模型。我们的目标是了解对人口特征和社会互动模式可能会出现什么形式的误解，以及这些误解如何影响行为和经济福利。第二个项目研究个人对其社会的误解如何影响社会对未知基本面的学习。一个令人惊讶的预测是，即使在任意少量的误解下，信息聚合也可能完全崩溃。第三个项目开发了一个信念扭曲的公理模型。其目的是提供一个统一的框架，以理解信念扭曲的核心例子，如歧义厌恶和后悔，这些已经被广泛观察到。该团队还希望使用这个新的框架来分析其他现象的行为影响，如动机认知，这些现象到目前为止在选择理论方面还没有得到很好的理解。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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 in economic theory that examines the determinants and implications of biased perceptions and beliefs. There are three components to this proposal. The first two study biased perceptions in the context of social interactions. The team is especially interested in understanding what kinds of misperceptions about society are likely to arise when people interact with only a non-representative sample of the population, and how such misperceptions affect people's ability to learn from their social contacts. The third component focuses on a type of bias that may affect individual decision making, called belief distortion. The research will give us new tools to understand and predict the outcomes of social interactions and decision-making under uncertainty. These are key to understanding many economic decisions. As a result, the project may eventually give us better ways to predict the effects of economic policies designed to promote the national interest.The first project in the proposal builds and analyzes a model of local interaction games with coordination motives. The goal is to understand what forms of misperceptions about population characteristics and social interaction patterns can arise, and how these misperceptions affect behavior and economic welfare. The second project studies how individuals' misperceptions about their societies affect social learning about unknown fundamentals. One surprising prediction is that even under arbitrarily small amounts of misperception, information aggregation may break down completely. The third project develops an axiomatic model of belief distortion. The aim is to provide a unified framework to understand central examples of belief distortion, such as ambiguity aversion and regret, that have been widely observed. The team also wants to use this new framework to analyze the behavioral implications of additional phenomena such as motivated cognition that thus far are not well understood in terms of choice theory.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.