Incorporating Cognitive Biases into Economic Analysis

Matthew Rabin

University of California, Berkeley

 

 

 

Lecture 1:  Principles and the Quasi-Bayesian Approach

 

Lecture 2: Illustrations and Applications

 

 

Optional readings:

Rabin, M. "Psychology and Economics," Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. XXXVI, 11-46, March 1998

Rabin, M. & Schrag, J. "First Impressions Matter: A Model of Confirmatory Bias", Quarterly Journal of Economics 114(1), 37-82, February 1999.

Rabin, M. "Inference by Believers in the Law of Small Numbers," Quarterly Journal of Economics 117(3), August 2002, 775-816.

Rabin, M., Read, D.,  Loewenstein, G. "Choice Bracketing", Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 19(1-3), 171-197, December 1999.

Rabin, M.,  Loewenstein, G.,  O'Donoghue, T. "Projection Bias in Predicting Future Utility", Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118 (4), November 2003, 1209-1248.

 

 

 

Matthew Rabin

University of California, Berkeley

 

Matthew Rabin is a professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his B.S. in Mathematics and in Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1984, and his Ph.D. in Economics from MIT in 1989. He has been employed by Berkeley since 1989, and has been a visiting professor at M.I.T., LSE, Northwestern, Harvard, and Cal Tech. His research includes developing formal theoretical models of fairness and risk preferences, biases in predicting preferences, cognitive biases and inferential errors, and procrastination and other forms of self-control problems. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 1999, and he was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal by the American Economic Association in 2001.