Related papers: A Theory of Ex Post Rationalization
The problem at the heart of this tutorial consists in modeling the path choice behavior of network users. This problem has been extensively studied in transportation science, where it is known as the route choice problem. In this…
We present a novel model for capturing the behavior of an agent exhibiting sunk-cost bias in a stochastic environment. Agents exhibiting sunk-cost bias take into account the effort they have already spent on an endeavor when they evaluate…
Many classical models of collective behavior assume that emergent dynamics result from external and observable interactions among individuals. However, how collective dynamics in human populations depend on the internal psychological…
Frequently we revise our first opinions after talking over with other individuals because we get convinced. Argumentation is a verbal and social process aimed at convincing. It includes conversation and persuasion. In this case, the…
Inspired by empirical work in neuroscience for Bayesian approaches to brain function, we give a unified probabilistic account of various types of symbolic reasoning from data. We characterise them in terms of formal logic using the…
Pearl observes that causal knowledge enables predicting the effects of interventions, such as actions, whereas descriptive knowledge only permits drawing conclusions from observation. This paper extends Pearl's approach to causality and…
Unaided human decision making appears to systematically violate consistency constraints imposed by normative theories; these biases in turn appear to justify the application of formal decision-analytic models. It is argued that both claims…
In the persuasion model, apart from a few special cases, comparative statics has been an open question. We answer it, delineating which shifts of the sender's interim payoff lead her optimally to choose a more informative signal. Our first…
When inferring the causal effect of one variable on another from correlational data, a common practice by professional researchers as well as lay decision makers is to control for some set of exogenous confounding variables. Choosing an…
Global change is reshaping ecosystems and societies. Strategic choices that were best yesterday may be sub-optimal tomorrow; and environmental conditions that were once taken for granted may soon cease to exist. In this setting, how people…
There is a common belief that humans and many animals follow transitive inference (choosing A over C on the basis of knowing that A is better than B and B is better than C). Transitivity seems to be the essence of rational choice. We…
A stylized experiment, the public goods game, has taught us the peculiar reproducible fact that humans tend to contribute more to shared resources than expected from economically rational assumptions. There have been two competing…
A speculative agent with Prospect Theory preference chooses the optimal time to purchase and then to sell an indivisible risky asset to maximize the expected utility of the round-trip profit net of transaction costs. The optimization…
This work lies in the fusion of experimental economics and data mining. It continues author's previous work on mining behaviour rules of human subjects from experimental data, where game-theoretic predictions partially fail to work.…
Researchers in psychology characterize decision-making as a process of eliminating options. While statistical modelling typically focuses on the eventual choice, we analyze consideration sets describing, for each survey participant, all…
Two main approaches for evaluating the quality of machine-generated rationales are: 1) using human rationales as a gold standard; and 2) automated metrics based on how rationales affect model behavior. An open question, however, is how…
We develop a mathematical and interpretative foundation for the enterprise of decision-theoretic statistical causality (DT), which is a straightforward way of representing and addressing causal questions. DT reframes causal inference as…
In dynamic settings each economic agent's choices can be revealing of her private information. This elicitation via the rationalization of observable behavior depends each agent's perception of which payoff-relevant contingencies other…
Motivated reasoning posits that people distort how they process information in the direction of beliefs they find attractive. This paper creates a novel experimental design to identify motivated reasoning from Bayesian updating when people…
A treatment policy defines when and what treatments are applied to affect some outcome of interest. Data-driven decision-making requires the ability to predict what happens if a policy is changed. Existing methods that predict how the…