This paper documents the economic relevance of measuring cognitive uncertainty: people’s subjective uncertainty over their ex ante utility-maximizing decision. In a series of experiments on choice under risk, the formation of beliefs and forecasts of economic variables, we show that cognitive uncertainty predicts various systematic biases in economic decisions. When people are cognitively uncertain—either endogenously or because the problem is designed to be complex—their decisions are heavily attenuated functions of objective probabilities, which gives rise to average behavior that is regressive to an intermediate option. This insight ties together a wide range of empirical regularities in behavioral economics that are typically viewed as distinct phenomena or even as reflecting preferences, including the probability weighting function in choice under risk; base rate insensitivity, conservatism, and sample size effects in belief updating; and predictable overoptimism and -pessimism in forecasts of economic variables. Our results offer a blueprint for how a simple measurement of cognitive uncertainty generates novel insights about what people find complex and how they respond to it.

中文翻译：

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认知不确定性

本文记录了测量认知不确定性的经济相关性：人们对其事前效用最大化决策的主观不确定性。在一系列关于风险选择、信念形成和经济变量预测的实验中，我们表明认知不确定性预测了经济决策中的各种系统性偏差。当人们在认知上不确定时——无论是内生的还是因为问题被设计得很复杂——他们的决定是客观概率的严重衰减函数，这会导致回归到中间选项的平均行为。这种洞察力将行为经济学中广泛的经验规律联系在一起，这些规律通常被视为不同的现象甚至反映偏好，包括风险选择中的概率加权函数；信念更新中的基本利率不敏感、保守主义和样本量效应；经济变量预测中可预测的过度乐观和悲观主义。我们的结果为认知不确定性的简单测量如何产生关于人们认为复杂的事物以及他们如何回应的新见解提供了蓝图。