An Experimental Investigation of Updating under Ambiguity

Christian Vossler and Dong Yan ()
Additional contact information
Dong Yan: Department of Economics, University of Tennessee

No 2019-02, Working Papers from University of Tennessee, Department of Economics

Abstract: We formulate new hypotheses that take advantage of information updating in order to discriminate between the two major specifications of multi-prior ambiguity models: ``kinked'' and ``smooth''. In particular, across comparable decision settings, we examine the effects of adding or trimming out certain priors, updating the weight on particular beliefs, changing the payoff for a single potential state, and modifying the distribution within certain priors. Our results show that the kinked specification does well in consistently predicting choices from 68% of participants, and the smooth specification predicts well for just 10%. We find evidence that people may use a compound lottery as one of their priors, subjects are insensitive to information that the best prior is more likely, and people place lower values on ambiguous lotteries that are relatively more complex. Our experimental methods are likely to be useful in other contexts, as they allow for simple tests of decision-making under ambiguity without placing restrictions on the weights participants place on priors, or reliance on comparisons to decision-making under risk.

Keywords: uncertainty; ambiguity; updating; multiple priors models; alpha-maxmin expected utility; recursive expected utility; lab experiment; self-protection; subjective expected utility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D81 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 79 pages
Date: 2019-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://web.utk.edu/~jhollad3/RePEc/2019-02.pdf First version, 2019 (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:ten:wpaper:2019-02

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Tennessee, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Scott Holladay ().