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Kahneman & Tversky's $\textit{prospect theory}$ tells us that humans perceive random variables in a biased but well-defined manner (1992); for example, humans are famously loss-averse. We show that objectives for aligning LLMs with human…
This paper explores how theories of the planning fallacy and the outside view may be used to conduct quality control and due diligence in project management. First, a much-neglected issue in project management is identified, namely that the…
This paper asks and answers the question of whether Kahneman's planning fallacy or Hirschman's Hiding Hand best explain performance in capital investment projects. I agree with my critics that the Hiding Hand exists, i.e., sometimes benefit…
Decisions in organizations are about evaluating alternatives and choosing the one that would best serve organizational goals. To the extent that the evaluation of alternatives could be formulated as a predictive task with appropriate…
Encouraged by decision makers' appetite for future information on topics ranging from elections to pandemics, and enabled by the explosion of data and computational methods, model based forecasts have garnered increasing influence on a…
Statisticians and data scientists find insights that help lead to better understanding and better outcomes. When clients and managers come to us for help (and even when they don't), we want to share our advice. While we should be free to…
The paper explores "uniqueness bias," a behavioral bias defined as the tendency of planners and managers to see their decisions as singular. For the first time, uniqueness bias is correlated with forecasting accuracy and performance in…
Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable reasoning and planning capabilities. Most prior work in this area has used LLMs to reason through steps from an initial to a goal state or criterion, thereby effectively reasoning in a…
Judgment of risk is key to decision-making under uncertainty. As Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky famously discovered, humans do so in a distinctive way that departs from mathematical rationalism. Specifically, they demonstrated…
We empirically analyze a large sample of firm sales growth expectations. We find that the relationship between forecast errors and lagged revision is non-linear. Forecasters underreact to typical (positive or negative) news about future…
This paper develops a model of reference-dependent assessment of subjective beliefs in which loss-averse people optimally choose the expectation as the reference point to balance the current felicity from the optimistic anticipation and the…
Systematically biased forecasts are typically interpreted as evidence of forecasters' irrationality and/or asymmetric loss. In this paper we propose an alternative explanation: when forecasts inform policy decisions, and the resulting…
This research explores how human-defined goals influence the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs) through purpose-conditioned cognition. Using financial prediction tasks, we show that revealing the downstream use (e.g., predicting stock…
A major source of risk in project management is inaccurate forecasts of project costs, demand, and other impacts. The paper presents a promising new approach to mitigating such risk, based on theories of decision making under uncertainty…
We identify and document a new principle of economic behavior: the principle of the Malevolent Hiding Hand. In a famous discussion, Albert Hirschman celebrated the Hiding Hand, which he saw as a benevolent mechanism by which unrealistically…
I study the behavior and the performance of the long-term forecasts issued by financial analysts with respect to the Extrapolation Hypothesis. That hypothesis states that investors, extrapolating from the firms' recent performances, are too…
Recent debates over adults' theory of mind use have been fueled by surprising failures of perspective-taking in communication, suggesting that perspective-taking can be relatively effortful. How, then, should speakers and listeners allocate…
There has been a growing interest in off-policy evaluation in the literature such as recommender systems and personalized medicine. We have so far seen significant progress in developing estimators aimed at accurately estimating the…
We develop a statistical test to detect lookahead bias in economic forecasts generated by large language models (LLMs). Using state-of-the-art pre-training data detection techniques, we estimate the likelihood that a given prompt appeared…
I model a rational agent who experiences endogenous deadline pressure in the face of a fixed future deadline. The agent holds a resource stock, and opportunities to spend resources arise randomly according to a Poisson process. When the…