Essays in behavioral economics
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The first chapter of the dissertation, entitled "Revisiting Regret Theory", suggests a more generalized version of the regret theories proposed by economists so far. Outcome regret is experienced when one compares a realized outcome to the outcome one could have received, if one had chosen a different action. In this paper I argue that the existing theories are flawed in that they make very restrictive assumptions about how people think with respect to foregone opportunities in the face of uncertainty. In light of some evidence as to how people actually think about past choice and realized outcomes, I propose to extend and generalize the existent theories of regret. I then apply my theory to existing experimental data, hitherto unexplained by the current theories. I find that my theory is capable of accounting for these data. The second chapter, entitled "Do Responses to Hypothetical and Subjective Questions Reveal Preferences?" and co-authored with Doug Bernheim, Daniel Bjorkegren, Jeffrey Naecker and Antonio Rangel, investigates the feasibility of inferring the choices people would make (if given the opportunity) based on their responses to hypothetical and subjective questions when they are not engaged in actual decision making. The ability to make such inferences is of potential value when choice data are unavailable or limited in ways that potentially impair standard methods of estimating choice mappings. We formulate prediction models relating choice distributions to these "non-choice" reactions, estimate them with data for a given set of items, and use them to predict out-of-sample choice distributions for new items at various prices. Our analysis shows that this method performs well relative to the conventional approaches that require more extensive choice data. The third chapter, entitled "Social and Economic Networks with Unknown Utilities", deals with social and economic networks in an historical perspective. The theoretical part of the paper is concerned with situations in which a utility from forming a certain link might be unknown to the agent prior to forming the link. This is in contrast with the standard networks literature that assumes that agents are fully aware of the utilities they will have from forming any possible link to any other agent. When this is not the case, agents might benefit from a "social planner", who will either force them to form certain links they wouldn't otherwise form, or change the benefits structure of the network in a way that will result in a voluntary formation of a more efficient network. Later, the paper looks at some situations in history where networks might have been formed with agents either underestimating or overestimating the benefits resulting from those networks.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2012 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Weissbrot, Irina |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Economics |
| Primary advisor | Bernheim, B. Douglas |
| Thesis advisor | Bernheim, B. Douglas |
| Thesis advisor | Jackson, Matthew O |
| Thesis advisor | Sprenger, Charles |
| Advisor | Jackson, Matthew O |
| Advisor | Sprenger, Charles |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Irina Weissbrot. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Economics. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2012. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2012 by Irina Weissbrot
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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