Status Quo Bias, Multiple Priors and Uncertainty Aversion

Motivated by the extensive evidence about the relevance of status quo bias both in experiments and in real markets, we study this phenomenon from a decision-theoretic prospective, focusing on the case of preferences under uncertainty. We develop an axiomatic framework that takes as a primitive the preferences of the agent for each possible status quo option, and provide a characterization according to which the agent prefers her status quo act if nothing better is feasible for a given set of possible priors. We then show that, in this framework, the very presence of a status quo induces the agent to be more uncertainty averse than she would be without a status quo option. Finally, we apply the model to a financial choice problem and show that the presence of status quo bias as modeled here might induce the presence of a risk premium even with risk neutral agents.Status quo bias, Ambiguity Aversion, Endowment Effect, Risk Premium

Status Quo Bias, Multiple Priors and Uncertainty Aversion

Motivated by the extensive evidence about the relevance of status quo bias both in experiments and in real markets, we study this phenomenon from a decision-theoretic prospective, focusing on the case of preferences under uncertainty. We develop an axiomatic framework that takes as a primitive the preferences of the agent for each possible status quo option, and provide a characterization according to which the agent prefers her status quo act if nothing better is feasible for a given set of possible priors. We then show that, in this framework, the very presence of a status quo induces the agent to be more uncertainty averse than she would be without a status quo option. Finally, we apply the model to a financial choice problem and show that the presence of status quo bias as modeled here might induce the presence of a risk premium even with risk neutral agents

Status Quo Bias, Multiple Priors and Uncertainty Aversion

Motivated by the extensive evidence about the relevance of status quo bias both in experiments and in real markets, we study this phenomenon from a decision-theoretic prospective, focusing on the case of preferences under uncertainty. We develop an axiomatic framework that takes as a primitive the preferences of the agent for each possible status quo option, and provide a characterization according to which the agent prefers her status quo act if nothing better is feasible for a given set of possible priors. We then show that, in this framework, the very presence of a status quo induces the agent to be more uncertainty averse than she would be without a status quo option. Finally, we apply the model to a financial choice problem and show that the presence of status quo bias as modeled here might induce the presence of a risk premium even with risk neutral agents

Speculative Trade and the Value of Public Information

In environments with expected utility, it has long been established that speculative trade cannot occur (Milgrom and Stokey [1982]), and that the value of public information is negative in economies with risk-sharing and no aggregate uncertainty (Hirshleifer [1971], Schlee [2001]). We show that these results are still true even if we relax expected utility, so that either Dynamic Consistency (DC) or Consequentialism is violated. We characterise no speculative trade in terms of a weakening of DC and find that Consequentialism is not required. Moreover, we show that a weakening of both DC and Consequentialism is sufficient for the value of public information to be negative. We therefore generalise these important results for convex preferences which contain several classes of ambiguity averse preferences

Context dependence and consistency in dynamic choice under uncertainty: the case of anticipated regret

We examine if and to what extent choice dispositions can allow dependence on contexts and maintain consistency over time, in a dynamic environment under uncertainty. We focus on a 'minimal' case of context dependence, opportunity dependence due to being affected by anticipated regret. There are two sources of potential inconsistency, one is arrival of information and the other is changing opportunities. First, we go over the general method of resolution of potential inconsistency, by taking any kinds of inconsistency as given constraints. Second, we characterize a class of choice dispositions that are consistent to information arrival but may be inconsistent to changing opportunities. Finally, we consider the full requirement of dynamic consistency and show that it necessarily implies independence of choice opportunities.

Dynamic Consistency, Valuable Information and Subjective Beliefs

Ambiguity sensitive preferences must fail either Consequentialism or Dynamic Consistency (DC), two properties that are compatible with subjective expected utility and Bayesian updating, while forming the basis of backward induction and dynamic programming. We examine the connection between these properties in a general environment of convex preferences over monetary acts and find that, far from being incompatible, they are connected in an economically meaningful way. In single-agent decision problems, positive value of information characterises one direction of DC. We propose a weakening of DC and show that one direction is equivalent to weakly valuable information, whereas the other characterises the Bayesian updating of the subjective beliefs which are revealed by trading behavior. In financial markets, we characterize no speculative trade, without requiring any form of Consequentialism, and show that there is weakly negative value of public information in risk-sharing environments with no aggregate uncertainty

Divergent Platforms

A robust feature of models of electoral competition between two opportunistic, purely office-motivated parties is that both parties become indistinguishable in equilibrium. I this short note, I show that this strong connection between the office motivation of parties and their equilibrium choice of identical platforms depends on the following two - possibly counterfactual - assumptions: 1. Issue spaces are uni-dimensional and 2. Parties are unitary actors whose preferences can be represented by expected utility functions. The main goal here is to provide an example of a two-party model in which parties offer substantially different platforms in equilibrium even though no exogenous asymmetries are assumed. In this example, some voters’ preferences over the 2-dimensional issue space are assumed to exhibit non-convexities and parties evaluate their actions with respect to a set of beliefs on the electorate.Downs model, Games with Incomplete Preferences, Knightian Uncertainty, Uncertainty Aversion, Platform Divergence