Professor Thaler’s Nobel Prize Speech (2018)

Richard H. Thaler, “From Cashews to Nudges: The Evolution of Behavioral Economics.” American Economic Review 108(6): 1265–1287, June 2018.

• "In the beginning there were stories [p. 1265]." Those stories were of anomalies with respect to the standard economic model of rational choice. For instance, the "cashews" in the title refer to an incident where guests thanked then-graduate-student Richard Thaler for rendering inaccessible the pre-dinner snacks: the guests seemed to believe that the loss of the option to eat cashews made them better off.

• A key development in behavioral science was the work of Kahneman and Tversky, which indicated that departures from fully rational behavior are systematic. This non-randomness suggests that modifications of the rational model could do a better job at explaining behavior. Further, Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory offers a simple explanation for some of these systematic departures.

• Standard economic theory often is presented as a descriptive theory of how people choose as well as a normative theory of how people should choose. It is better at the latter (normative) task than at the former (descriptive) task. 

• Thaler and Shefrin propose a planner/doer model of intrapersonal (or intra-firm) conflict; the planner component of a decision maker can alter the doer's incentives by employing commitment strategies or deploying the (payoff-compromising) induction of guilt. 

• Economics typically assumes that dollars are fungible, that the best way to spend them is independent of where the dollars originated. But people assign income to different "mental accounts" according to its origin. Some income might be allocated to a mental checking account, so it is psychologically available for spending, whereas other funds might be assigned to mental savings, and therefore, are psychologically unavailable for quotidian consumer purchases. Dollars, in practice, are not fungible -- as anyone who has ever "played with house money" knows. 

• Is it fair to raise prices just because demand increases, as when a snowstorm makes snow shovels highly sought after? Many people (but not many economists!) think that such price increases are unfair, and might punish businesses that engage in such behavior. 

• The endowment effect is when mere “ownership” of an object (like a coffee mug) seems to raise the valuation that the “owner” places on the object. Endowment effects reduce the willingness-to-trade of owned objects, and some of Professor Thaler's work shows that endowment effects are common even when decision makers operate in markets, and when they have opportunities to learn over time.

• Even in financial markets, with their ongoing nature, high stakes, and sophisticated participants, security prices are not always right: for instance, parts of a firm can bizarrely be deemed more valuable in financial markets than is the entire firm (even though the complementary parts are not themselves of negative value). 

• Draft picks in the National Football League are mispriced: the best value for teams seems to lie in draft picks in the early part of the second round. The people making the draft picks might be excessively optimistic about their ability to identify winners when making first round picks.

• In the standard rational choice model, nudges (aspects of the choice architecture that don't affect standard payoffs or incentives) would not have much influence on choices -- but they often do. 

• Some firms try to use nudges to take advantage of those systematic departures from rational behavior on the part of their consumers; Professor Thaler calls this nefarious sort of choice architecture "sludge."

Larson, List, and Metcalfe (2016) on Myopic Loss Aversion and the Equity Premium Puzzle

Francis Larson, John A. List, and Robert D. Metcalfe, “Can Myopic Loss Aversion Explain the Equity Premium Puzzle? Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment with Professional Traders.” August 31, 2016; available here.

• The puzzle: the real return on US equities is about 8% per annum, versus about 1% for riskless assets. This spread cannot easily be explained as a risk premium. 

• One hypothesis: traders display myopic loss aversion (MLA), and hence the frequent downticks (short-term declines in asset value) are psychologically costly – people will only put up with these costs if there is an offsetting premium in the monetary return. If MLA can explain the equity premium puzzle, then it must be present in the “marginal” trader. 

• Laboratory experiments have found that myopic loss aversion is common. The standard design involves varying the rate at which price information is delivered to traders. Those who receive information at high frequency are exposed to more revelations of downticks, and hence, if they display MLA, they will underinvest in the risky asset, the one that is subject to lots of downticks. 

• The Larson, List, and Metcalfe paper employs a (natural?) field experiment, where traders do not know they are taking part in an experiment; they think they are beta-testing a new online trading platform. 

• The traders' recompense is to be paid eventually in-kind based on the profits that they accrue during their two weeks of testing. They can “buy” a risky asset whose return is tied (in a not-fully-obvious way) to the US dollar exchange rate. The tying is such as to bias the return to the asset to be positive. 

• The experiment reveals MLA – traders who are given infrequent (once per 4 hours) price updates keep more of their stake in the risky asset, and earn considerably more, than those traders who receive second-by-second updates. 

• Traders tend to desire more frequent price updates, but perhaps that information degrades their performance. 

• Since both the Frequent (n=73) and Infrequent (n=78) groups of traders can trade at any time, this experiment avoids a confounding feature of past laboratory experiments, that both information and trade opportunities are altered among conditions.

Professor Thaler’s American Economic Association Presidential Address

Richard H. Thaler, “Behavioral Economics: Past, Present, and Future.” American Economic Review 106(7): 1577–1600, 2016 (working paper pdf available here).

• Economics provides an approach to optimal decision making -- and that is well and good. But we should not let that model distract us from how people actually make decisions.

• When people make decisions, they make them as fallible Humans, not as textbook Econs. They remain fallible Humans irrespective of how often we are told that: (1) their decisions will look "as if" they are Econs; (2) their departures from the full Econ will be unsystematic; (3) when the stakes are high they will convert into Econs; (4) with time they will learn to be Econ; and, (5) the special magic of market settings will see to it that only Econs survive.

• Does the market "get prices right"? Consider the closed-end mutual fund with ticket symbol CUBA. Typically, CUBA is priced at about a 10-to-15 percent discount relative to its underlying assets. But after December 18, 2014, CUBA started to trade at a 70% premium over the value of its underlying securities, and premium pricing continued for about a year.

• Why? On December 18, 2014, President Obama announced that the US would normalize diplomatic relations with Cuba. The CUBA mutual fund has nothing to do with the country of Cuba.

• When Humans make decisions under uncertainty, the sort of preferences they display are not those of expected utility theory. Rather, many decisions seem to involve "prospect theory"-style preferences: (1) utility is based on changes in wealth from some reference point; (2) people are loss averse; and (3) people do not weight potential outcomes according to the objective probabilities.

• For intertemporal preferences, people often display a present bias, a taste for instantaneous gratification, and in many ways, do not exhibit exponential discounting.

• As with preferences, people also do not seem to hold fully rational beliefs. In particular, people display excessive optimism and excessive confidence in their beliefs.

• Actual choices are influenced by "supposedly irrelevant factors [p. 1595]," where the supposition of irrelevance is made within standard economic models. For instance, default settings tend to influence ultimate choices, even in high-stakes situations (such as retirement planning) where the defaults are less-than-optimal and easy to override.

• In the future, economic models will incorporate those behavioral features that best improve their predictive accuracy without imposing high costs in terms of complexity; "behavioral" will disappear as an adjective for a subset of economics, as all economics will be as behavioral as necessary.

Busse et al. (2013) on Salience in Car Markets

Meghan R. Busse, Nicola Lacetera, Devin G. Pope, Jorge Silva-Risso, and Justin R. Sydnor. “Estimating the Effect of Salience in Wholesale and Retail Car Markets.” American Economic Review 103(3): 575-79, 2013 [pdf].

• People have limited attention, and hence, even the provision of full information might not lead to “optimal” decision making. 

• Retail prices for used cars show a significant discontinuity when the mileage on those cars passes from 9,999 to 10,000 miles; similar discontinuities exist at higher multiples of 10,000, too. Apparently buyers focus on the left-most digit of the mileage, and pay less than full heed to the other digits, so they overpay for a car with 69,950 miles on it, for instance. The overpayment is significant, on the order of $300. 

• Car owners respond to this bias by trading in their cars at a higher rate before they reach milestones such as 50,000 miles. That is, left-digit bias affects not only prices of used cars, but also the composition of used cars offered for sale. 

• Wholesale prices for used cars show similar price discontinuities at major milestones, but these seem largely to be reflecting the retail effects of left-digit inattention.

Kamenica, Mullainathan, and Thaler (2011) on Poorly Informed Consumers

Emir Kamenica, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Richard Thaler, “Helping Consumers Know Themselves.” American Economic Review 101(3): 417– 422, 2011 [pdf available here].

• Do cell phone users know about how many minutes they will talk under various pricing plans? Cell phone companies might be better informed than consumers – and possibly offer contracts that consumers will wrongly think are their best option. This is the issue explored by Kamenica, Mullainathan, and Thaler (2011). 

• If price menus are fixed, the more information about her preferences a customer has, the better off she is. But when firms can choose pricing terms, increased information for consumers does not necessarily make consumers better off. 

• As in the Choice Architecture article, RECAP (Record, Evaluate, and Compare Alternative Prices) is suggested. The idea is that firms must disclose pricing schemes, along with information to consumers about their own usage. Presumably this information could be used by third-party firms to compare plans, and recommend to consumers the plan that is best for them. 

• “Adverse targeting [p. 418]” is what the authors call the phenomenon where firms offer pricing plans to consumers that will tempt those consumers but end up being costly to them. 

• The requirement to reveal pricing is meant in part to avoid price shrouding, where important secondary prices – late fees, luggage fees, internet hook-up charges – are not made readily available to consumers. 

• For RECAP to help consumers, the consumers must want the information, and have easy means of responding to the information. For new sorts of services, estimating a consumer’s usage from past behavior is not possible. [I am heartened to learn from David Halpern's Inside the Nudge Unit that RECAP has been abandoned as a term because no one could remember what it stood for.]