Date/Time
Date(s) - 27/03/2024
11:30 am - 12:30 pm

Stanton Hudja, Assistant Professor of Business Analytics and Strategy at the Illinois Institute of Technology, will present to our economics graduate students and faculty on Wednesday, March 27 in KTH 334!

Stanton is an experimental economist who has research interests in behavioral economics, microeconomic theory, and computational economics. His research focuses on understanding decision making and experimentation in uncertain environments. He will present the paper, “Attitudes toward Unknown Outcomes“

Abstract

This paper uses an experiment to elicit individuals’ attitudes towards an unknown outcome and tests whether these attitudes are independent of the rest of the decision problem. The experiment consists of novel choice lists where subjects repeatedly choose between two lotteries that only differ in their second outcome. The first lottery consists of both a known and unknown outcome. The second lottery is similar, but replaces this unknown outcome with a known replacement outcome that varies across choices in the choice list. Choice lists differ in the two lotteries’ common known outcome (a gain versus a loss) and the common probability that this known outcome is implemented. We find that subjects’ first conditional valuation of an unknown outcome (i.e., switching point) is independent of the choice list provided; a large number of subjects prefer an unknown outcome to a loss, but not to a gain. While subjects’ first conditional valuation is independent of the choice list, subjects’ later valuations depend on the immediately preceding choice list.

View Stanton’s professional website.