For this next seminar only we ask you to re-arrange your schedule and join us on a Monday, for another very interesiting presentation by one of the latest additions to the Economics department!
On February 28, 2011 at 12.30 a.m. in room E Department of Economics, Noemi Pace PhD will present her work on "Non-Multiple Prior Models of Decision Making Under Ambiguity: new experimental evidence" joint work with John Hey.
Here is an abstract of her presentation:
ABSTRACT
We examine the performance of non multiple prior probability models of decision making under uncertainty/ambiguity from the perspective of their descriptive and predictive power. Focusing on the class of theories that proceed indirectly through the use of a preference functional, we try to answer the question as to whether the new generalisations of the Subjective Expected Utility (SEU) theory are significantly better than SEU. We employ an innovative experimental design which enables us to reproduce ambiguity in the laboratory in a transparent and non-probabilistic way, using a Bingo Blower (BB). We operate with a very simple experiment in which there are three possible events (the colours of the table-tennis balls in the BB). We ask subjects to allocate a given total number of tokens to the three events, given certain exchange rates between tokens and money. When we play out a particular decision problem, we draw one ball from the BB and subjects are paid in money the number of tokens that they allocated to that event multiplied by the exchange rate. In contrast with previous experiments, rather than carrying out statistical test comparing the various theories, we apply a constrained maximum likelihood procedure for the generation of maximum likelihood estimates of models with general constraints on parameters to assess which of the new generalizations of SEU has the relatively better performance.
Please remember that WISE went green, thus we kindly ask you to confirm by email your participation to the seminar in due time, in order to allow to prepare the right amount of food. Please note that lunch will take place between 12.30 and 1 pm, thus the actual presentation will start only at 1 pm, should you prefer to skip lunch!
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