Essays in behavioral economics

This thesis studies individual choice in both individualistic and interactive decisions, under different situations of risk, uncertainty and time delay. The first chapter of my dissertation investigates the tendency of human beings to make choices that are biased towards alternatives in the present. I characterize the general class of utilities which are consistent with present-biased behavior. I show that any present-biased preference has a subjective max-min representation, which can be cognitively interpreted as the decision maker considering the most conservative “present equivalents” in the face of subjective uncertainty about future tastes. The second chapter of my thesis provides desiderata of choice consistency that experimenters should employ while estimating time preferences from choice data. We also show how application of this desiderata can help us learn new insights from previous experimental studies. The third chapter of my thesis establishes a tight relation between non-standard behaviors in the domains of risk and time by considering a decision maker with non-expected utility preferences who believes that only present consumption is certain while any future consumption is uncertain. We provide the first complete characterization of the two-way relations between i) certainty effect and present bias, and, ii) common ratio effect and the common difference effect. A corollary to our results is that hyperbolic discounting implies the Common Ratio Effect and that quasi-hyperbolic discounting implies the Certainty Effect. In the fourth chapter of my thesis, I use variation in experimental design (time-discounting) and belief data from subjects to investigate the determinants of behavior in Finitely Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma games.Arts, Faculty ofVancouver School of EconomicsGraduat

Belief elicitation in political protest experiments : when the mode does not teach us about incentives to protest

Many recent experiments studying political protests elicit subjects’ beliefs and actions, before and after an information intervention, to assess the causal role of beliefs on actions. We show that unless beliefs are symmetric and unimodal, using a belief elicitation scheme that is mismatched with the research question may affect the magnitude and even reverse the sign of identified effects. We provide a simple characterization of when such a sign reversal occurs. As an example, we revisit Cantoni et al. (2019)’s influential study of whether political protests are strategic complements or substitutes. We show how their belief elicitation method allows, in theory, a novel and alternative interpretation of their results, which could have been avoided with a different method