SBEE seminar series: Kirby Nielsen

When Choices Are Mistakes

Abstract:

Using a laboratory experiment, we identify whether decision makers consider it a mistake to violate canonical choice axioms. To do this, we incentivize subjects to report which of several axioms they want their decisions to satisfy. Then, subjects make lottery choices which might conflict with their stated axiom preferences. We give them the opportunity to re-evaluate their decisions when lotteries conflict with desired axioms. We find that a majority of individuals want to follow the axioms and revise their lottery choices to be consistent with them. We interpret this to mean that many axiom violations in our sample were mistakes.

Paper: https://kirbyknielsen.com/wp-content/uploads/kirby/Mistakes.pdf

Speaker Bio:

Kirby Nielsen is an assistant professor of economics at Caltech. She received her PhD from The Ohio State University in 2018 and spent two years as a postdoc at Stanford before joining the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences at Caltech. Her research uses laboratory experiments to test decision theory models and study individual decision making more broadly.

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The Social, Behavioral and Experimental Economics seminar series is a joint presentation of the School of Information, the Ross School of Business and the LSA Department of Economics.