Basic Concepts

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Basic Concepts

Probability Judgment


The Methods of Behavioral Economics

  • They define themselves, not on the basis of the research methods that they employ, but rather their application of psychological insights to economics.

Heuristic Mechanism

  • Availability heuristic
    • people may judge the probabilities of future events based on how easy those events are to imagine or to retrieve from memory"
  • Hindsight bias
    • "Because events which actually occurred are easier to imagine than counterfactual events that did not, people often overestimate the probability they previously attached to events which later happened"
  • Curse of Knowledge bias
    • "people who know a lot find it hard to imagine how little others know
  • Representativeness
    • "People judge conditional probabilities like P(hypothesis|data) or P(examples| class) by how well the data represents the hypothesis or the example represents the class.
    • Law of Small Numbers
      • "Small samples are thought to represent the properties of the statistical process that generate them"