Related papers: A Theory of Ex Post Rationalization
How should my own decisions affect my beliefs about the outcomes I expect to achieve? If taking a certain action makes me view myself as a certain type of person, it might affect how I think others view me, and how I view others who are…
Humans display a tendency to pay more attention to bad outcomes, often in a disproportionate way relative to their statistical occurrence. They also display euphorism, as well as a preference for the current state of affairs (status quo…
Predicting the future is an important component of decision making. In most situations, however, there is not enough information to make accurate predictions. In this paper, we develop a theory of causal reasoning for predictive inference…
The theory of rational choice assumes that when people make decisions they do so in order to maximize their utility. In order to achieve this goal they ought to use all the information available and consider all the choices available to…
This study proposes a tractable stochastic choice model to identify motivations for prosocial behavior, and to explore alternative motivations of deliberate randomization beyond ex-ante fairness concerns. To represent social preferences, we…
Subjective expected utility theory assumes that decision-makers possess unlimited computational resources to reason about their choices; however, virtually all decisions in everyday life are made under resource constraints - i.e.…
This survey reviews recent developments in revealed preference theory. It discusses the testable implications of theories of choice that are germane to specific economic environments. The focus is on expected utility in risky environments;…
At the beginning of a dynamic game, players may have exogenous theories about how the opponents are going to play. Suppose that these theories are commonly known. Then, players will refine their first-order beliefs, and challenge their own…
Many regenerative arguments in stochastic processes use random times which are akin to stopping times, but which are determined by the future as well as the past behaviour of the process of interest. Such arguments based on "conditioning on…
The rational choice theory is based on this idea that people rationally pursue goals for increasing their personal interests. In most conditions, the behavior of an actor is not independent of the person and others' behavior. Here, we…
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…
We review economic research regarding the decision making processes of individuals in economics, with a particular focus on papers which tried analyzing factors that affect decision making with the evolution of the history of economic…
Much of economic theory is built on observations of aggregate, rather than individual, behavior. Here, we present novel findings on human shopping patterns at the resolution of a single purchase. Our results suggest that much of our…
Present bias, the tendency to weigh costs and benefits incurred in the present too heavily, is one of the most widespread human behavioral biases. It has also been the subject of extensive study in the behavioral economics literature. While…
The standard rational choice model describes individuals as making choices by selecting the best option from a menu. A wealth of evidence instead suggests that individuals often filter menus into smaller sets - consideration sets - from…
This paper provides a model to analyze and identify a decision maker's (DM's) hypothetical reasoning. Using this model, I show that a DM's propensity to engage in hypothetical thinking is captured exactly by her ability to recognize…
There is a consensus that human and non-human subjects experience temporal distortions in many stages of their perceptual and decision-making systems. Similarly, intertemporal choice research has shown that decision-makers undervalue future…
Direct reciprocity is a mechanism for the evolution of cooperation in repeated social interactions. According to this literature, individuals naturally learn to adopt conditionally cooperative strategies if they have multiple encounters…
In this work we generalize standard Decision Theory by assuming that two outcomes can also be incomparable. Two motivating scenarios show how incomparability may be helpful to represent those situations where, due to lack of information,…
Counterfactuals are often described as 'retrospective,' focusing on hypothetical alternatives to a realized past. This description relates to an often implicit assumption about the structure and stability of exogenous variables in the…