Related papers: Temptation: Immediacy and certainty
This paper studies lying in a novel context. Previous work has focused on situations in which people are either fully aware of the economic consequences of all available actions (e.g., die-under-cup paradigm), or they are uncertain, but…
For optimal stopping problems with time-inconsistent preference, we measure the inherent level of time-inconsistency by taking the time needed to turn the naive strategies into the sophisticated ones. In particular, when in a repeated…
From skipped exercise classes to last-minute cancellation of dentist appointments, underutilization of reserved resources abounds. Likely reasons include uncertainty about the future, further exacerbated by present bias. In this paper, we…
How do decisions change with the economic environment and with time? This paper studies general nonstationary stopping problems and provides the methodological tools to answer these questions. First, we identify conditions that ensure a…
Choice consistency with utility maximization, as a key assumption in economics, has been extensively used to evaluate decision quality of individuals and to predict real-world outcomes across different contexts. Here we investigate the…
How should we decide which fairness criteria or definitions to adopt in machine learning systems? To answer this question, we must study the fairness preferences of actual users of machine learning systems. Stringent parity constraints on…
This paper considers dynamic moral hazard settings, in which the consequences of the agent's actions are not precisely understood. In a new continuous-time moral hazard model with drift ambiguity, the agent's unobservable action translates…
In this paper, we examine the biases that arise when firms run A/B tests on continuous parameters to estimate global treatment effects on performance metrics of interest; we particularly focus on price experiments to measure the price…
An agent acquires a costly flexible signal before making a decision. We explore to what degree knowledge of the agent's information costs helps predict her behavior. We establish an impossibility result: learning costs alone generate no…
It is well-known that for a group of time-consistent decision makers their collective time preferences may become time-inconsistent. Jackson and Yariv (2014) demonstrated that the result of aggregation of exponential discount functions…
The Quantum Decision Theory, developed recently by the authors, is applied to clarify the role of risk and uncertainty in decision making and in particular in relation to the phenomenon of dynamic inconsistency. By formulating this notion…
Consider an agent taking two successive decisions to maximize his expected utility under uncertainty. After his first decision, a signal is revealed that provides information about the state of nature. The observation of the signal allows…
Test takers do not give equally reliable responses. They take different responding strategies and they do not make the same effort to solve the problem and answer the question correctly. The consequences of differential test takers'…
A possibly immortal agent tries to maximise its summed discounted rewards over time, where discounting is used to avoid infinite utilities and encourage the agent to value current rewards more than future ones. Some commonly used discount…
The goal of this article is to investigate how human participants allocate their limited time to decisions with different properties. We report the results of two behavioral experiments. In each trial of the experiments, the participant…
We study a decision-maker's problem of finding optimal monetary incentive schemes for retention when faced with agents whose participation decisions (stochastically) depend on the incentive they receive. Our focus is on policies constrained…
Many biological, psychological and economic experiments have been designed where an organism or individual must choose between two options that have the same expected reward but differ in the variance of reward received. In this way,…
The tendency of repeating past choices more often than expected from the history of outcomes has been repeatedly empirically observed in reinforcement learning experiments. It can be explained by at least two computational processes:…
A fixed-confidence, finite-sample problem of active hypothesis testing arises in many safety-critical applications. Situated in the context of sequential hypothesis testing, this paper studies the effect of hypothesis elimination on the…
A decision maker repeatedly chooses one of a finite set of actions. In each period, the decision maker's payoff depends on fixed basic payoff of the chosen action and the frequency with which the action has been chosen in the past. We…