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What do we expect when we say something to someone, and what do they expect when they hear it? When is a conversation successful? The book considers a wide set of two-person conversations, and a bit of game theory, to show how conversational statements and their interpretations are governed by beliefs. Thinking about beliefs is suitable for communication analysis because beliefs are well-defined and measurable, allowing to differentiate between successful understandings and their less successful counterparts: misunderstandings.

The book describes the theoretical framework and empirical measurements of misunderstandings – written by an economist, but in simple words and using interdisciplinary concepts. The material will benefit students and researchers of behavioural economics and its neighbouring fields, and anyone interested in human language.

The paper presents a meta dataset covering 13 experiments on social learning games. It is found that in situations where it is empirically optimal to follow others and contradict one's own information, the players err in the majority of cases, forgoing substantial parts of earnings. The average player contradicts her own signal only if the empirical odds ratio of the own signal being wrong, conditional on all available information, is larger than 2:1, rather than 1:1 as would be implied by rational expectations. A regression analysis formulates a straightforward test of rational expectations which strongly rejects the null. (JEL D82, D83, D84)

An experiment by Tversky and Kahneman (1981) illustrates that people's tendency to evaluate risky decisions separately can lead them to choose combinations of choices that are first-order stochastically dominated by other available combinations. We investigate the generality of this effect both theoretically and experimentally. We show that for any decisionmaker who does not have constant-absolute-risk-averse preferences and who evaluates her decisions one by one, there exists a simple pair of independent binary decisions where the decisionmaker will make a dominated combination of choices. We also characterize, as a function of a person's preferences, the amount of money that she can lose due to a single mistake of this kind. The theory is accompanied by both a real-stakes laboratory experiment and a large-sample survey from the general U.S. population. Replicating Tversky and Kahneman's original experiment where decisionmakers with prototypical prospect-theory preferences will choose a dominated combination, we find that 28% of the participants do so. In the survey we ask the respondents about several hypothetical large-stakes choices, and find higher proportions of dominated choice combinations. A statistical model that estimates preferences from the survey results is best fit by assuming people have utility functions that are close to prospect-theory value functions and that about 83% of people bracket narrowly. None of these results varies strongly with the personal characteristics of participants. We also demonstrate directly that dominated choices are driven by narrow bracketing: when we eliminate the possibility of narrow bracketing by using a combined presentation of the decisions, the dominated choices are eliminated in the laboratory experiment and are greatly reduced in the survey. -- Lottery choice ; narrow framing ; representative-sample experiments

We show that any decision maker who "narrowly brackets" (evaluates decisions separately) and does not have constant-absolute-risk-averse preferences will make a first-order stochastically dominated combined choice in some simple pair of independent binary decisions. We also characterize the preference-contingent monetary cost from this mistake. Empirically, in a real-stakes laboratory experiment that replicates Tversky and Kahneman's (1981) experiment, 28 percent of participants choose dominated combinations. In a representative survey eliciting hypothetical large-stakes choices, higher proportions do so. Violation rates vary little with personal characteristics. Average preferences are prospect-theoretic, with an estimated 89 percent of people bracketing narrowly. (JEL D12, D81)

We empirically investigate the possibility that a decision maker prefers to avoid making a decision and instead delegates it to an external device, e.g., a coin flip. A large data set from the centralized clearinghouse for university admissions in Germany shows a choice pattern of applicants that is consistent with coin flipping and that entails substantial consequences for the matching outcome. In a series of experiments capturing the relevant features of university choice, participants often choose lotteries between allocations rather than certain allocations. This contradicts most theories of choice such as expected utility. A survey among university applicants links their choices to the experiments and confirms that the choice of random allocations is intentional.

Multiplicative growth processes that are subject to random shocks often have a skewed distribution of outcomes. In a number of incentivized laboratory experiments we show that a large majority of participants either strongly underestimate skewness or ignore it completely. Participants misperceive the outcome distribution's spread to be far too narrow-band and they estimate the median to lie too close to the distribution's center. The observed bias in expectations is irrespective to risk preferences and fairly robust to feedback. It is consistent with a behavioral model in which geometric growth is confused with linear growth. The misperception is a possible explanation of investors' difficulties with real-world financial products like leveraged ETFs.

AbstractWe study an investment experiment with a representative sample of German households. Respondents invest in a safe asset and a risky asset whose return is tied to the German stock market. Experimental investments correlate with beliefs about stock market returns and exhibit desirable external validity at least in one respect: they predict real-life stock market participation. But many households are unresponsive to an exogenous increase in the risky asset's return. The data analysis and a series of additional laboratory experiments suggest that task complexity decreases the responsiveness to incentives. Modifying the safe asset's return has a larger effect on behaviour than modifying the risky asset's return.