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Speaker

Jörg Rieskamp

Content
Past research illustrates that people violate standard rationality assumptions. The present course will show how a psychological approach can help understanding these violations. The first part of the course shows that people are equipped with a toolbox of heuristics or strategies to solve the decision problems they face. To explain when people use which heuristic a computational model is presented that specifies how people select strategies from their repertoire. The theory assumes that individuals develop subjective expectations for the strategies they have and select strategies proportional to their expectations, which are updated on the basis of learning. Several studies illustrate that learning indeed can help people to select the right strategy. The second part of the course shows that many economic theories cannot explain the probabilistic nature of preferential choices, that is, why an individual makes different choices in nearly identical situations. The work illustrates how sequential sampling models can explain probabilistic choices and various violations of standard rationality assumptions. According to sequential sampling models, choices are the result of a dynamic process during which the decision maker compares options against each other to update a preference state.

Disciplines

cognitive science, decision making, cognitive modeling, consumer behavior, behavior economics

References

• Rieskamp, J., & Otto, P. E. (2006). SSL: A theory of how people learn to select strategies. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 135, 207-236.
• Rieskamp, J., Busemeyer, J. R., & Mellers, B. A. (2006). Extending the bounds of rationality: Evidence and theories of preferential choice. Journal of Economic Literature, 44, 631-661.

CV
Jörg Rieskamp is a professor of economic psychology in the department of psychology at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He received his Ph.D. in psychology from the Free University of Berlin, Germany. In his research he focuses on the development and testing of cognitive theories of judgment and decision processes. The theories provide a description of the underlying cognitive processes leading to a decision. They also provide an explanation of why human behavior often differs from the predictions of economic theory.