Cognitive sophistication and deliberation times

Carlos Alós-Ferrer and Johannes Buckenmaier

Experimental Economics, 2021, vol. 24, issue 2, No 8, 558-592

Abstract: Abstract Differences in cognitive sophistication and effort are at the root of behavioral heterogeneity in economics. To explain this heterogeneity, behavioral models assume that certain choices indicate higher cognitive effort. A fundamental problem with this approach is that observing a choice does not reveal how the choice is made, and hence choice data is insufficient to establish the link between cognitive effort and behavior. We show that deliberation times provide an individually-measurable correlate of cognitive effort. We test a model of heterogeneous cognitive depth, incorporating stylized facts from the psychophysical literature, which makes predictions on the relation between choices, cognitive effort, incentives, and deliberation times. We confirm the predicted relations experimentally in different kinds of games.

Keywords: Heterogeneity; Iterative reasoning; Cognitive sophistication; Deliberation times; Depth of reasoning; Cognitive effort (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C91 D80 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10683-020-09672-w Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
Working Paper: Cognitive sophistication and deliberation times (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:expeco:v:24:y:2021:i:2:d:10.1007_s10683-020-09672-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ry/journal/10683/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10683-020-09672-w

Access Statistics for this article

Experimental Economics is currently edited by David J. Cooper, Lata Gangadharan and Charles N. Noussair

More articles in Experimental Economics from Springer, Economic Science Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().