Publications

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2023
Working Paper

How People Use Statistics

By: Pedro Bordalo, John J. Conlon, Nicola Gennaioli, Spencer Yongwook Kwon and Andrei Shleifer

We document two new facts about the distributions of answers in famous statistical problems: they are i) multi-modal and ii) unstable with respect to irrelevant changes in the problem. We offer a model in which, when solving a problem, people represent each hypothesis... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Microeconomics; Mathematical Methods; Behavioral Finance

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September 2021
Article

Diagnostic Bubbles

By: Pedro Bordalo, Nicola Gennaioli, Spencer Yongwook Kwon and Andrei Shleifer

We introduce diagnostic expectations into a standard setting of price formation in which investors learn about the fundamental value of an asset and trade it. We study the interaction of diagnostic expectations with two well-known mechanisms: learning from prices and... View Details

Keywords: Bubble; Speculation; Diagnostic Expectations; Price Bubble; Mathematical Methods

Article

Memory and Representativeness

By: Pedro Bordalo, Katherine Baldiga Coffman, Nicola Gennaioli, Frederik Schwerter and Andrei Shleifer

We explore the idea that judgment by representativeness reflects the workings of episodic memory, especially interference. In a new laboratory experiment on cued recall, participants are shown two groups of images with different distributions of colors. We find that i)... View Details

Keywords: Cued Recall; Interference; Similarity; Probabilistic Judgments; Heuristics And Biases

2020
Working Paper

Older People Are Less Pessimistic About the Health Risks of COVID-19

By: Pedro Bordalo, Katherine B. Coffman, Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer

A central question for understanding behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic, at both the individual and collective levels, is how people perceive the health and economic risks they face. We conducted a survey of over 1,500 Americans from May 6–13, 2020, to understand... View Details

Keywords: Health Pandemics; Risk and Uncertainty; Perception; Age

March 2019
Article

Beliefs about Gender

By: Pedro Bordalo, Katherine Baldiga Coffman, Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer

We conduct laboratory experiments that explore how gender stereotypes shape beliefs about ability of oneself and others in different categories of knowledge. The data reveal two patterns. First, men’s and women’s beliefs about both oneself and others exceed observed... View Details

Keywords: Performance Evaluation; Perspective; Prejudice and Bias; Gender

2018
Working Paper

Diagnostic Bubbles

By: Pedro Bordalo, Nicola Gennaioli, Spencer Yongwook Kwon and Andrei Shleifer

We introduce diagnostic expectations into a standard setting of price formation in which investors learn about the fundamental value of an asset and trade it. We study the interaction of diagnostic expectations with two well-known mechanisms: learning from prices and... View Details

Keywords: Bubbles; Price Bubble; Mathematical Methods

November 2016
Article

Stereotypes

By: Pedro Bordalo, Katherine Baldiga Coffman, Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer

We present a model of stereotypes based on Kahneman and Tversky's representativeness heuristic. A decision maker assesses a target group by overweighting its representative types, which we formally define to be the types that occur more frequently in that group than in... View Details

Keywords: Prejudice and Bias

Forthcoming
Article

Imagining the Future: Memory, Simulation and Beliefs

By: Pedro Bordalo, Giovanni Burro, Katherine B. Coffman, Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer

How do people form beliefs about novel risks, with which they have little or no experience? Motivated by survey data on beliefs about Covid we collected in 2020, we build a model based on the psychology of selective memory. When a person thinks about an event,... View Details

Keywords: Expectations; Memory; COVID-19 Pandemic; Risk and Uncertainty; Cognition and Thinking