题 目：Asymmetric Attention, Asymmetric Errors, and Status Quo Bias

讲座人：耿森博士

王亚南经济研究院

时 间：2011年10月20日（星期四）16：30—18：00

地 点：经济楼D110

主办单位：王亚南经济研究院

经济学院

摘要： Decisions involving default options are increasingly widespread and in favor with policy makers. Existing studies of status quo bias (SQB)--decision makers tendency to stick to a default option--implicitly assume that information is perfect. This paper studies a novel channel of SQB, namely the impact that the default option has on attention and decision errors. I design novel experiments in which search time and binary comparisons in a choice set are observable. I find that SQB arises even when the choice is among prizes of fixed monetary value expressed in arithmetic form. I also find strikingly asymmetric choice errors: 38% of the time subjects fail to choose an alternative better than the default, but in just 4% of time do they incorrectly choose an alternative worse than the default, and asymmetric attention, defined as more time devotion to default objects. I substantiate the causal relationship between asymmetric attention and asymmetric choice errors by switching off asymmetric attention and subsequently generating reduced choice-error asymmetry. Finally, I propose an attention-based theory of SQB to model the findings.