Cognitive Biases. Mistakes or Missing Stakes?

Autor/inn/en	Enke, Benjamin; Genîzî, Ûrî; Hall, Brian J.; Martin, David; Nelidov, Vadim; Offerman, Theo; Ven, Jeroen van de
Institution	National Bureau of Economic Research
Titel	Cognitive Biases. Mistakes or Missing Stakes?
Quelle	Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research (2021) PDF als Volltext (1); PDF als Volltext (2) Link als defekt meldenVerfügbarkeit
Reihe	NBER working paper series. w28650
Beigaben	Illustrationen
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	online; Monographie; Graue Literatur
DOI	10.3386/w28650
Schlagwörter	Fehler; Experiment; Arbeitspapier; Systematisierung; Student; Nairobi
Abstract	Despite decades of research on heuristics and biases, empirical evidence on the effect of large incentives - as present in relevant economic decisions - on cognitive biases is scant. This paper tests the effect of incentives on four widely documented biases: base rate neglect, anchoring, failure of contingent thinking, and intuitive reasoning in the Cognitive Reflection Test. In laboratory experiments with 1,236 college students in Nairobi, we implement three incentive levels: no incentives, standard lab payments, and very high incentives that increase the stakes by a factor of 100 to more than a monthly income. We find that response times - a proxy for cognitive effort - increase by 40% with very high stakes. Performance, on the other hand, improves very mildly or not at all as incentives increase, with the largest improvements due to a reduced reliance on intuitions. In none of the tasks are very high stakes sufficient to de-bias participants, or come even close to doing so.
Erfasst von	ZBW - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft, Kiel
Update	2021/4