Behavioral economists increasingly argue that violations of rationality axioms provide a new rationale for paternalism - to “de-bias” individuals who exhibit errors, biases and other allegedly pathological psychological regularities associated with Tversky and Kahneman’s (in Science...

How do firms set prices when faced with an uncertain market? Analyzing the pricing strategies of used car dealers using online data and interviews, we find that dealers employ an aspiration level heuristic similar to a Dutch auction. At the same time, the aggregate market is well described by a...

Distinguishing between risk and uncertainty, this paper draws on the psychological literature on heuristics to consider whether and when simpler approaches may outperform more complex methods for modelling and regulating the financial system. We find that: (i) simple methods can sometimes...

Nearly a century ago, Frank Knight famously distinguished between risk and uncertainty with respect to the nature of decisions made in a business enterprise. He associated generating economic profit with making entrepreneurial decisions in the face of fundamental uncertainties. This uncertainty...

Heuristics are commonly viewed in behavioral economics as inferior strategies resulting from agents’ cognitive limitations. Uncertainty is generally reduced to a form of risk, quantifiable in some probabilistic format. We challenge both conceptualizations and connect heuristics and uncertainty...