Probability Judgements in Multi-Stage Problems : Experimental Evidence of Systematic Biases

We report empirical evidence that in problems of random walk with positive drift, bounded rationality leads individuals to under-estimate the probability of success in the long run.In particular, individuals who were given the stage by stage probability distribution failed to aggregate this information in a multi-stage case.Estimations of the long run probability distribution did not differ much from the given stage-by-stage probability distribution, and were systematically lower than the accurate one.Applications to risk perception in financial markets are considered