DECISION TIME, CONSIDERATION TIME, AND STATUS QUO BIAS.
Economists increasingly appreciate the value of studying the time taken to make decisions in order to provide insights into decision makers' choices. This article shows that studying how time is allocated among individual options is also valuable in helping researchers to understand the impact defau...
| Published in: | Economic Inquiry Vol. 54; no. 1; pp. 433 - 450 |
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| Format: | Article |
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Wiley-Blackwell
Jan2016
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| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN=111238774&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ssf uiTerm: 111238774 longDbName: Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson) uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00952583 EIQ jtl: Economic Inquiry issn: 00952583 maglogo: Y pubinfo: dt: Jan2016 vid: 54 iid: 1 pid: 480 pub: Wiley-Blackwell artinfo: ui: 111238774 10.1111/ecin.12239 ppf: 433 ppct: 17 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 695KB tig: atl: DECISION TIME, CONSIDERATION TIME, AND STATUS QUO BIAS. aug: au: Geng, Sen affil: Assistant Professor, The Wang Yanan Institute for Studies in Economics (WISE) and the Finance and Economics Experimental Laboratory (FEEL), Xiamen University, Xiamen 361005, China su: Decision making Choice (Psychology) Default (Finance) Valuation Error analysis in mathematics sug: subj: Decision making Choice (Psychology) All Other Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services Default (Finance) Valuation Error analysis in mathematics ab: Economists increasingly appreciate the value of studying the time taken to make decisions in order to provide insights into decision makers' choices. This article shows that studying how time is allocated among individual options is also valuable in helping researchers to understand the impact default options have on decision makers' attention allocation, as approximated by how the time is allocated. The study of this impact generates new insights into the well-known choice phenomenon of status quo bias, which typically refers to decision makers' tendency to stick to a default option. By designing a series of novel experiments, I find that this bias arises even when the choice is among prizes of fixed monetary value expressed in arithmetic form. I also find asymmetric attention (i.e., more time devoted to default options) and strikingly asymmetric choice errors; specifically, decision makers fail to select an alternative better than the default 28% of the time, while they incorrectly select an alternative worse than the default only 11% of the time; and provide evidence supporting a causal relationship between asymmetric attention and asymmetric errors. ( JEL D03, D12, D83) pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: N holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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