Teams Make You Smarter: Learning and Knowledge Transfer in Auctions and Markets by Teams and Individuals

We study the impact of team decision making on market behavior and its consequences for subsequent individual performance in the Wason selection task, the single-most studied reasoning task. We reformulated the task in terms of "assets" in a market context. Teams of traders learn the task’s solution faster than individuals and achieve this with weaker, less specific, performance feedback. Some teams even perform better than the best individuals. The experience of team decision-making in the market also creates positive knowledge spillovers for post-market individual performance in solving new Wason tasks, implying that team experiences enhance individual problem-solving skills.team decisions, markets, auctions, Wason selection task, rationality

Translation Errors in the Aggregation of Consumer Recommendations

There has been a substantial increase of websites providing consumers with information about products and services. This information is usually presented in the form of verbal reviews and numerical ratings. It is assumed implicitly that consumers can integrate adequately the information across the two presentation modes (verbal and numerical). Research on compatibility effects between stimulus and response formats, however, suggests that preference consistency is higher (lower) in cases of compatible (noncompatible) formats, implying that information aggregation across the two modes is inefficient. The results of two experiments confirm this conjecture. Decision makers are not aware of this effect. [to cite]

The Effect of Monetary Feedback and Information Spillovers on Cognitive Errors: Evidence from Competitive Markets

Abstract A vast literature shows that individuals frequently violate normative principles in reasoning. In evaluating the relevance of these findings for psychology, economics, and related disciplines, it is natural to ask whether reasoning errors reflect random aberrations or systematic biases. One straightforward way to approach this question is to test their persistence at the aggregate level. In this paper, we report results of four studies designed to determine if information dissemination in competitive auctions can reduce, or even eliminate, logical errors in the Wason selection task. Our results show that payoff feedback and exposure to the information flow drive the aggregate behavior toward the normative solution. We also found evidence of spillover effects from informed to uninformed traders in one-sided combinatorial auctions as well as positive transfer effects from competitive to individual settings. We discuss the implication of our results for future research at the interface of psychology and economics

Collective Induction Without Cooperation? Learning and Knowledge Transfer in Cooperative Groups and Competitive Auctions

There is strong evidence that groups perform better than individuals do on intellective tasks with demonstrably correct solutions. Typically, these studies assume that group members share common goals. The authors extend this line of research by replacing standard face-to-face group interactions with competitive auctions, allowing for conflicting individual incentives. In a series of studies involving the well-known Wason selection task, they demonstrate that competitive auctions induce learning effects equally impressive as those of standard group interactions, and they uncover specific and general knowledge transfers from these institutions to new reasoning problems. The authors identify payoff feedback and information pooling as the driving factors underlying these findings, and they explain these factors within the theoretical framework of collective induction

Reasoning and Institutions: Do Markets Facilitate Logical Reasoning in the Wason Selection Task?

A vast literature shows that individuals frequently fail to identify the normative solutions in logical reasoning tasks. Much attention has been devoted to the study of these deviations at the individual level; less effort was exerted to investigate whether institutional settings might facilitate and improve reasoning. In this paper we address this question by embedding the Wason selection task in a competitive market: each of the four cards of the task was traded over multiple periods in anonymous continuous double auctions, and with real financial incentives. The results of two experiments involving 28 markets, with eight subjects each, indicate that errors in logical reasoning persist, and are present in a wide variety of trading variables, such as prices, volume and liquidity. The market's behavior reflects the normatively correct outcome only when a substantial number of traders know the correct solution

Coherence and Consistency of Investors’ Probability Judgments

This study investigates the quality of direct probability judgments and quantile estimates with a focus on calibration and consistency. The two response modes use different measures of miscalibration, so it is difficult to directly compare their relative (in)accuracy. We employed a more refined within-subject design in which decision makers (DMs) used both response modes to make judgments about a random sample of stocks accompanied by identical information to facilitate comparison between the two judgment methods. DMs judged the probabilities that the stocks will reach a certain threshold, provided lower and upper bounds of these forecasts, and estimated median, 50%, 70%, and 90% confidence intervals of their future prices. We found that the judgments were internally consistent and coherent, but in most cases they were slightly miscalibrated. We used several new methods of analysis that allow for more precise and reliable comparison between the two response modes. We inferred point probability estimates for the target events from the confidence intervals and analyzed them by the same methods applied to binary judgments. Interestingly, when we quantified miscalibration in identical fashion for both methods we did not find evidence of differential levels of miscalibration for the probability judgments and the confidence intervals. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these results