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Human behavioral biases are a topic of great importance within the field of economics, but they also are of significance for a broad range of human endeavors. Within economics we most often encounter these biases in puzzling patterns of individual behavior, as in insurance purchases, affinity for gambling, or stock portfolio choices. But, behavioral biases are also thought to play an important role in many critical aggregate phenomena, from market swings to partisan political deadlock. This thesis presents a model for how several of these biases may have arisen together during evolution and suggests that individual biases are intricately linked to the dynamics of group decision making: 1) confirmation bias acts as a stabilizing influence when individuals provide input to group decisions, holding their input steady in the face of rival motives or distracting information; 2) group decisions tend to accentuate belief polarization; and 3) probability weighting, when seen through this evolutionary lens, simply undoes the polarization that occurred when the shared belief was acquired. The final chapter presents an experiemental approach to overcoming behavioral biases in the context of deliberative democracy. Small group dialog often triggers biases that lead to belief polarization, but when properly structured, participants coalesce around causal knowledge of the problem domain, rather than entrenched conceptions of the solution.

Contemporary approaches to decision making describe a decision problem by sets of states and outcomes, and a rich set of acts: functions from states to outcomes over which the decision maker (DM) has preferences. Real problems do not come so equipped. It is often unclear what the state and outcome spaces would be. We present an alternative foundation for decision making, in which the primitive objects of choice are syntactic programs. We show that if the DM's preference relation on objects of choice satisfies appropriate axioms, then we can find states, outcomes, and an embedding of the programs into Savage acts such that preferences can be represented by EU in the Savage framework. A modeler can test for SEU behavior without having access to the subjective states and outcomes. We illustrate the power of our approach by showing that it can represent DMs who are subject to framing effects. -- decision theory ; subjective expected utility ; behavioral anomalies

In this dissertation, I contribute to the literature on Behavioral Microeconomic Theory by analyzing the consequences of well-established departures from rationality and their remedies in strategic interactions. More precisely, I investigate credulity, reduced sensitivity to partitioned prices, and correlation neglect in models of democratic elections, imperfect competition, and contracting under hidden action. Moreover, to facilitate the analysis of other departures from rationality and their impact on economic well-being, I define a solution concept for games between players with dual-selves and discuss its relations to existing equilibrium concepts in the literature on Behavioral Economic Theory.

Abstract
Economic theory and conventional wisdom suggest that time preference can cause or perpetuate poverty. Might poverty also or instead cause impatient or impulsive behavior? This paper reports a randomized lab experiment and a partially randomized field experiment, both in India, and analysis of the American Time Use Survey. In all three studies, poverty is associated with diminished behavioral control. The primary contribution of this empirical paper is to isolate the direction of causality from poverty to behavior. Three similar possible theoretical mechanisms, found in the psychology and behavioral economics literatures, cannot be definitively separated. One supported theoretical explanation is that poverty, by making economic decision-making more difficult, depletes cognitive control.