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Caltech

Behavioral Social Neuroscience Seminar / Bray Theory Workshop

Wednesday, April 8, 2015
4:00pm to 5:00pm
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Baxter B125
Biases and Implicit Knowledge
Tom Cunningham, Assistant Professor, IIES, Stockholm University; Visiting Associate, Caltech,

I present a model of judgment in a brain consisting of two systems, each of which has private information, but in which the second system has access to the output of the first system. Judgments will be influenced by irrelevant associations, an empirical regularity which has been described elsewhere as "heuristic," "inattentive," "coarse," or "similarity-based" reasoning. The model additionally predicts that, although decisions may be inconsistent, decision-makers will never choose dominated outcomes, a stylized fact of the experimental literature. The model has implications for interpreting laboratory choices, and for the economic analysis of persuasive advertising and policy nudges.

For more information, please contact Jenny Niese by phone at 626-395-6010 or by email at [email protected].