Replication data for: Hypothetical Thinking and Information Extraction in the Laboratory

Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s) Ignacio Esponda; Emanuel Vespa

Name	File Type	Size	Last Modified
EspondaVespa_Data			10/12/2019 11:43:PM
LICENSE.txt	text/plain	14.6 KB	10/12/2019 07:43:PM

Project Description

Summary: In several common-value environments (e.g., auctions or elections), players should make informational inferences from opponents' strategies under certain hypothetical events (e.g., winning the auction or being pivotal). We design a voting experiment that identifies whether subjects make these inferences and distinguishes between hypothetical thinking and information extraction. Depending on feedback, between 50 and 80 percent of subjects behave non-optimally. More importantly, these mistakes are driven by difficulty in extracting information from hypothetical, but not from actual, events. Mistakes are robust to experience and hints, and also arise in more general settings where players have no private information.

Scope of Project

Subject Terms: [Correlation Neglect, Contingent Thinking]

JEL Classification:
      C91 Design of Experiments: Laboratory, Individual
      D71 Social Choice; Clubs; Committees; Associations
      D72 Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
      D82 Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
      D83 Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness

Universe: Undergraduate students at New York University

Data Type(s): experimental data

Methodology

Data Source: Self-collected

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Published Versions

V1 [2019-10-12]

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