Séminaire Microéconomie : Tous les mercredis
Heure : 12h15 – 13h30
Date :28/05/2025
Salle : 3001

Arrieta GONZALO (University of Zurich) – “Procedural Decision-Making in the Face of Complexity (joint work with Kirby Nielsen)”

CV : A large body of work documents that complexity affects individuals’ choices, but the literature has remained mostly agnostic about why. We provide direct evidence that individuals use fundamentally different choice processes for complex and simple decisions. We hypothesize that individuals resort to “procedures”—cognitively simpler choice processes that we characterize as being easier to describe to another person—as the complexity of the decision environment increases. We test our hypothesis using two experiments, one with choices over lotteries and one with choices over charities. We exogenously vary the complexity of the decision environment and measure the describability of choice processes by how well another individual can replicate the decision-maker’s choices given the decision-maker’s description of how they chose. We find strong support for our hypothesis: Both of our experiments show that individuals’ choice processes are more describable in complex choice environments, which we interpret as evidence that decision-making becomes more procedural as complexity increases. We show that procedural decision-makers choose more consistently and exhibit fewer dominance violations, though we remain agnostic about the causal effect of procedures on decision quality. Additional secondary evidence suggests that procedural decision-making is a choice simplification that reduces the cognitive costs of decision-making.

Organisateurs :

Julien COMBE (Pôle d’Economie du CREST)
​​​​​​​​​​​​Yves Le YAOUANQ (Pôle d’Economie du CREST)
​​​​​​​​​Matias NUNEZ (Pôle d’Economie du CREST)

Commanditaires :
CREST