{"title":"Shackle's Decision Order and Time: A Reader's Guide","authors":"P. J. Phillips","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3923942","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3923942","url":null,"abstract":"There is something worthwhile in making Shackle's ideas more accessible by identifying the common structural elements shared by Shackle's theory of potential surprise and mainstream orthodox and behavioural decision theory, including prospect theory. To this end, it became clear to me that some sort of reader's guide would be very useful. As such, I have turned my notes on Shackle, which will form the foundation for more substantive work, into a general reader's guide for Shackle's Decision Order and Time in Human Affairs. A reader who picks up Shackle without much prior experience quickly finds himself in uncharted territory. While reading widely in the Austrian School and other more heterodox fields on inquiry within economics will certainly help, I wonder how well this allows the reader to connect what he finds with the mainstream. Making this connection is the purpose of this reader’s guide.","PeriodicalId":375605,"journal":{"name":"DecisionSciRN: Economic Decision Theory (Topic)","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130737585","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Myopia and Intertemporal Choice","authors":"Miao Jin, Jian Li, Juanjuan Meng, Jinwei Sun","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3888547","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3888547","url":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates whether imperfect foresight affects intertemporal choice using three experiments. We study the effects of both exogenously introduced and naturally occurring (i.e., summer vacation) forecasting difficulties, as well as the effects of increasing internal forecasting effort. These experiments provide consistent evidence that people tend to avoid allocating money to periods they cannot clearly foresee. This avoidance also leads to a non-monotonic change in discount rate across the boundaries of summer vacation, a pattern observed for the first time in the literature. The fact that imperfect foresight has important and novel effects on intertemporal choice deserves further investigation.","PeriodicalId":375605,"journal":{"name":"DecisionSciRN: Economic Decision Theory (Topic)","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122934235","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
C. Zhang, Jeffrey Hemmeter, Judd B. Kessler, R. Metcalfe, R. Weathers
{"title":"Nudging Timely Wage Reporting: Field Experimental Evidence from the United States Social Supplementary Income Program","authors":"C. Zhang, Jeffrey Hemmeter, Judd B. Kessler, R. Metcalfe, R. Weathers","doi":"10.3386/W27875","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3386/W27875","url":null,"abstract":"We study a large-scale (n=50,000) natural field experiment implemented by the U.S. Social Security Administration that was aimed at increasing the timely and accurate self-reporting of wages by Supplemental Security Income (SSI) recipients. Sending a letter reminding SSI recipients of their wage reporting responsibilities significantly increased both the likelihood of reporting any earnings and the total amount of earnings reported, though this effect decays slightly over time. However, the specific letter content—providing social information or highlighting the salience of penalties—had no systematic effect. We develop a conservative estimate that the letters generated roughly $5.91 in savings on average per dollar spent for the U.S. government.","PeriodicalId":375605,"journal":{"name":"DecisionSciRN: Economic Decision Theory (Topic)","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130830150","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A. Achtziger, Carlos Alós-Ferrer, Alexander Ritschel
{"title":"Cognitive Load in Economic Decisions","authors":"A. Achtziger, Carlos Alós-Ferrer, Alexander Ritschel","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3654144","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3654144","url":null,"abstract":"Intuitive decision making has a large and often negative impact in economic decisions, but its measurement and quantification remains challenging. Following research from psychology, behavioral economists have often attempted to causally manipulate the balance of intuition and deliberation by relying on experimental manipulations as cognitive load. However, these attempts have resulted in mixed success, with many null results and no clear general pattern. We explain the possible reasons behind these developments and offer avenues for improvement. First, we show that a very simple formal model of decision processes offers a straightforward test to determine whether cognitive load has been successfully induced, hence disentangling failed inductions and true null results. Specifically, cognitive load in economically-relevant tasks must result in shorter response times. Second, we show that the intuitive arguments on the behavioral implications of cognitive load do not hold on closer, formal examination, unless strong assumptions are made that may or may not hold in typical economic experiments. We then report on seven economic experiments (joint N = 628) using different cognitive load manipulations and confirm the implications of the model. While the effect on response times is strong and pervasive, behavioral effects are weak and elusive. Our research serves as a warning on the differences between economic tasks and psychological experiments and the difficulties associated with importing methods uncritically.","PeriodicalId":375605,"journal":{"name":"DecisionSciRN: Economic Decision Theory (Topic)","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129536912","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Smoke on the Market: Inattentive Investors and the War in Ukraine","authors":"A. Kochnev","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3579107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3579107","url":null,"abstract":"This paper confronts predictions of rational choice, gain-loss, and inattention theories in the context of financial markets during war in Ukraine. Using various measures of conflict intensity as an explanatory variable, the paper finds that the Ukrainian stock market a) did not use all available information, b) reacted non-linearly in parameters with where regime 1 being characterized by a negative reaction and regime 2 characterized by ignorance. The paper also finds heterogeneous effects with respect to geographical location of the enterprises: a negative effect for enterprises with located in close proximity to the conflict events and a positive effect for the ones located elsewhere.<br><br>The author argues that the first finding is only compatible with the inattention framework, and suggests that the second one is driven by the portfolio re-balancing effect.","PeriodicalId":375605,"journal":{"name":"DecisionSciRN: Economic Decision Theory (Topic)","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128330116","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Data Fiduciary in Order to Alleviate Principal-Agent Problems in the Artificial Big Data Age","authors":"Julia M. Puaschunder","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3464968","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3464968","url":null,"abstract":"The classic principal-agent problem in political science and economics describes agency dilemmas or problems when one person, the agent, is put in a situation to make decisions on behalf of another entity, the principal. A dilemma occurs in situations when individual profit maximization or principal and agent are pitted against each other. This so-called moral hazard is nowadays emerging in the artificial big data age, when big data reaping entities have to act on behalf of agents, who provide their data with trust in the principal’s integrity and responsible big data conduct. Yet to this day, no data fiduciary has been clearly described and established to protect the agent from misuse of data. This article introduces the agent’s predicament between utility derived from information sharing and dignity in privacy as well as hyper-hyperbolic discounting fallibilities to not clearly foresee what consequences information sharing can have over time and in groups. The principal’s predicament between secrecy and selling big data insights or using big data for manipulative purposes will be outlined. Finally, the article draws a clear distinction between manipulation and nudging in relation to the potential social class division of those who nudge and those who are nudged.","PeriodicalId":375605,"journal":{"name":"DecisionSciRN: Economic Decision Theory (Topic)","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132232194","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How Would J M Keynes Have Responded to Shackle’s 1949 ‘Probability and Uncertainty’ Paper?: Keynes Would Have Required That the Paper Must Be Revised Before Publication","authors":"M. E. Brady","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3431529","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3431529","url":null,"abstract":"J M Keynes, in a letter to Joan Robinson on November 9th,1936, responded to the utter mess that Joan Robinson had made of his liquidity preference theory of the rate of interest in the General Theory by stating: <br> <br>“Dear Joan, I beg you not to publish. For your argument, as it stands is most certainly nonsense.”<br>Robinson eventually cut out all of the material, that Keynes had described as nonsense, that dealt with Keynes’s liquidity preference theory of the rate of interest before it was published in book form in 1937.<br> <br>In 1949, Shackle published a paper that is in the same category as Joan Robinson’s paper that was very severely criticized by Keynes in his letter to her of November 9th, 1936. Shackle’s “Probability and Uncertainty”, which he republished uncorrected in 1955 in his book Uncertainty in Economics, demonstrates that Shackle simply did not understand that his entire understanding of probability and decision making was based on the antinomian fallacy. The antinomian fallacy asserts that all moments of time are unique. Therefore, there can be no similarities or dissimilarities, or analogies, or pattern recognition between past event, present events, or future events. The antinomian fallacy, which stands at the center of Shackle’s entire theory of possibility (Shackle had no theory of probability) means that no concept of probability is even possible. Thus, only deduction is possible. Keynes’s conceptualization of an inductive logic, based on his logical theory of probability in the A Treatise on Probability (1921) and its application in the General Theory (1936), had to be completely rejected by Shackle.<br> <br>Shackle’s system directly contradicts and is inconsistent with Keynes logical theory of probability. Keynes himself confirmed Townshend’s 1938 statement in correspondence that the theory of liquidity preference rests on “my theory of probability”, which consisted of (a) the logical relation of probability, P(a/h)=α, where α is a rational degree of belief,(b) non-numerical probability and (c)weight of the evidence.<br> <br>Given this confirmation by Keynes to Townshend, Keynes would have had no choice but to have informed Shackle that his argument in 1949(1955) is “certainly nonsense” which must be revised immediately. Naturally, Shackle never published any paper putting forth his antinomian based theory of possibility while Keynes was still alive. Shackle knew that the result would be a swift and complete critique of his system by Keynes that he could not answer intellectually.","PeriodicalId":375605,"journal":{"name":"DecisionSciRN: Economic Decision Theory (Topic)","volume":"117 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121416691","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Giver's Impatience: A Self-Other Decision Model of Intertemporal Choices","authors":"Adelle X. Yang, Oleg Urminsky","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3448191","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3448191","url":null,"abstract":"Intertemporal choices represent one of the most common and fundamental trade-offs in consumer decision-making. How do intertemporal choices made for another person differ from similar choices made for oneself? To examine this question, the present research introduces the first integrative self-other decision model and experimentally tests five model derived hypotheses. This model distinguishes between the psychological processes associated with vicarious versus reactive utility and highlights the pivotal role of anticipated affective reaction in interpersonal decision-making. Seven experiments and two additional replications reveal consistent results supporting model predictions. In particular, the results show that an intertemporal choice for a specified other person tends to reveal more impatience than an otherwise identical choice for oneself, contrary to what has previously been assumed, predicted, and reported in studies using abstract and unspecified others as recipients. This “giver’s impatience” is moderated by decision characteristics, including the anticipated timing of the recipient’s affective reaction, the affective value of the choice options, and decision responsibility. This research provides critical insights and opens new avenues for research into intertemporal choices and interpersonal decision-making.","PeriodicalId":375605,"journal":{"name":"DecisionSciRN: Economic Decision Theory (Topic)","volume":"98 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114592885","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Basic Introduction to Expected Value Analyses and Investments Through the Corporate Form","authors":"M. Bakker, Roelf Jakob de Weijs","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3329268","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3329268","url":null,"abstract":"This text first of all provides a basic introduction to calculating the expected value of investments (§ 2). Secondly, it aims to illustrate how the investment decision can change if the investment is made through a limited liability company (§ 3). The key characteristic of limited liability companies can radically change the assessment of the expected value of a given investment opportunity. Because of its basic structure with shareholders without liability and creditors with recourse possibilities limited to the company itself, a project with a negative expected value can become a project with a positive expected value for the shareholders if undertaken by a limited liability company. This is problematic if one assumes that the basic goal of corporate law is to 'foster overall social welfare'.","PeriodicalId":375605,"journal":{"name":"DecisionSciRN: Economic Decision Theory (Topic)","volume":"44 11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129752890","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rational Inattention, Competitive Supply, and Psychometrics","authors":"Andrew Caplin, Dániel Csaba, John Leahy, O. Nov","doi":"10.3386/W25224","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3386/W25224","url":null,"abstract":"We introduce a simple method of recovering attention costs from choice data. Our method rests on a precise analogy with production theory. Costs of attention determine consumer demand and consumer welfare just as a competitive firm's technology determines its supply curve and profits. We implement our recovery method experimentally, outline applications, and link our work to the broader literature on inattention and mistaken decisions.","PeriodicalId":375605,"journal":{"name":"DecisionSciRN: Economic Decision Theory (Topic)","volume":"195 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133206200","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}