Past Events

For the last century, economists have assumed that agents have 'deep' time preferences -- in other words, agents value pleasures and pains in t years more than pleasures and pains in t+1 years. By contrast, philosophers have argued that discounting future rewards results from `'myopia,’’ i.e. imperfect foresight. We develop this alternative hypothesis. Specifically, we show that time discounting arises naturally when a perfectly patient Bayesian decision-maker receives noisy signals about the future (instead of being able to make noiseless…

The capacity for cognitive control, one of the defining characteristics of human cognition, is also remarkably limited. Typically, people cannot engage in more than a few — and sometimes only a single — control-demanding task at once. Limited capacity was a defining element in the earliest conceptualizations of cognitive control, it remains one of the most widely accepted axioms of cognitive psychology, and is even the basis for some laws (e.g., against the use of mobile devices while driving). It…

I will present the results of two related experimental studies (work in collaboration with Luca Polonio) in which we used eye-tracking to measure the dynamic patterns of visual information acquisition in games. In a first study, participants played one-shot two-player normal-form games in which either, neither, or only one of the players had a dominant strategy. Our method allowed us to predict whether the decision process would lead to equilibrium choices or not, and to attribute out-of-equilibrium responses to limited…