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Graeber, Thomas W. Remove Graeber, Thomas W. →

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  • 2023
  • Working Paper

Complexity and Time
By: Benjamin Enke, Thomas Graeber and Ryan Oprea
We provide experimental evidence that core intertemporal choice anomalies -- including extreme short-run impatience, structural estimates of present bias, hyperbolicity and transitivity violations -- are driven by complexity rather than time or risk preferences. First,...  View Details
Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Motivation and Incentives
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  • 2022
  • Working Paper

Stories, Statistics and Memory
By: Thomas Graeber, Christopher Roth and Florian Zimmermann
For most decisions, we rely on information encountered over the course of days, months or years. We consume this information in various forms, including abstract summaries of multiple data points – statistics – and contextualized anecdotes about individual instances...  View Details
Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Information Types; Media; Cognition and Thinking
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  • 2022
  • Working Paper

Confidence, Self-Selection and Bias in the Aggregate
By: Benjamin Enke, Thomas Graeber and Ryan Oprea
The influence of behavioral biases on aggregate outcomes like prices and allocations depends in part on self-selection: whether rational people opt more strongly into aggregate interactions than biased individuals. We conduct a series of betting market, auction and...  View Details
Keywords: Prejudice and Bias; Cognition and Thinking; Markets; Price
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  • 2023
  • Working Paper

Cognitive Uncertainty in Intertemporal Choice
By: Benjamin Enke and Thomas Graeber
This paper studies the relevance of cognitive uncertainty – subjective uncertainty over one's utility-maximizing action – for understanding and predicting intertemporal choice. The main idea is that when people are cognitively noisy, such as when a decision is complex,...  View Details
Keywords: Cognitive Uncertainty; Intertemporal Choice; Cognition and Thinking; Complexity; Decision Choices and Conditions
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  • Article

Measuring the Scientific Effectiveness of Contact Tracing: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
By: Thiemo Fetzer and Thomas Graeber
Contact tracing has for decades been a cornerstone of the public health approach to epidemics, including Ebola, severe acute respiratory syndrome, and now COVID-19. It has not yet been possible, however, to causally assess the method’s effectiveness using a randomized...  View Details
Keywords: COVID-19; Contact Tracing; Public Health; Infectious Diseases; Health Pandemics
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  • March 2021
  • Article

Bayesian Signatures of Confidence and Central Tendency in Perceptual Judgment
By: Yang Xiang, Thomas Graeber, Benjamin Enke and Samuel Gershman
This paper theoretically and empirically investigates the role of Bayesian noisy cognition in perceptual judgment, focusing on the central tendency effect: the well-known empirical regularity that perceptual judgments are biased towards the center of the...  View Details
Keywords: Visual Perception; Bayesian Modeling; Perception; Judgments
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  • 2022
  • Working Paper

Intertemporal Altruism
By: Felix Chopra, Armin Falk and Thomas Graeber
Most prosocial decisions involve intertemporal tradeoffs. Yet, the timing of prosocial utility flows is ambiguous and bypassed by most models of other-regarding preferences. We study the behavioral implications of the time structure of prosocial utility,...  View Details
Keywords: Altruism; Donation; Intertemporal Decision-making; Time Inconsistency
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  • 2022
  • Working Paper

Heterogeneity of Gain-Loss Attitudes and Expectations-Based Reference Points
By: Pol Campos-Mercade, Lorenz Goette, Thomas Graeber, Alex Kellogg and Charles Sprenger
Existing tests of reference-dependent preferences assume universal loss aversion. This paper examines heterogeneity in gain-loss attitudes, and explores its implications for identifying models of the reference point. In two experimental settings we measure gain-loss...  View Details
Keywords: Reference-dependent Preferences; Rational Expectations; Personal Equilibrium; Endowment Effect; Expectations-based Reference Points
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  • March 24, 2020
  • Article

Delayed Negative Effects of Prosocial Spending on Happiness
By: Armin Falk and Thomas Graeber
Does prosocial behavior promote happiness? We test this longstanding hypothesis in a behavioral experiment that extends the scope of previous research. In our Saving a Life paradigm, every participant either saved one human life in expectation by triggering a targeted...  View Details
Keywords: Prosocial Behavior; Altruism; Happiness; Well-being; Spending; Behavior
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  • Forthcoming
  • Article

Inattentive Inference
By: Thomas Graeber
This paper studies how people infer a state of the world from information structures that include additional, payoff-irrelevant states. For example, learning from a customer review about a product’s quality requires accounting for the reviewer’s otherwise-irrelevant...  View Details
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