Extrapolative Beliefs In Perceptual And Economic Decisions

Download or read book Extrapolative Beliefs in Perceptual and Economic Decisions written by Cary Frydman and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 39 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical component of both economic and perceptual decision-making under uncertainty is the belief formation process. However, most research has studied belief formation in economic and perceptual decision-making in isolation. One reason for this separate treatment may be the assumption that there are distinct psychological mechanisms that underlie belief formation in economic and perceptual decisions. An alternative theory is that there exists a common mechanism that governs belief formation in both domains. Here, we test this alternative theory by combining a novel computational modeling technique with two well-known experimental paradigms. We estimate a drift-diffusion model (DDM) and provide an analytical method to decode prior beliefs from DDM parameters. Subjects in our experiment exhibit strong extrapolative beliefs in both paradigms. In line with the common mechanism hypothesis, we find that a single computational model explains belief formation in both tasks, and that individual differences in belief formation are correlated across tasks.