B. Experiments, Incentives (something
that makes you want to do
something or to work harder, because
you know that you
will benefit by doing this),
and Learning
A second class of
explainawaytions emerged in the 1980s, in part as a reaction to the findings of
Kahneman and Tversky
and an early paper of mine (Thaler 1980).
These retorts (to reply immediately in an angry or humorous way),
usually delivered orally in workshops
(an occasion when a
group of people meet to learn about
a particular subject)
and conference presentations rather than in print,[2] were intended to be justifications for
continuing business as
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usual. Some of the critiques
were aimed at the empirical methods used in these early papers, namely
hypothetical survey questions such as problems 1 and 2 above. Economists have
never been very impressed by such data because the subjects have nothing on the line (so to have
something on the line means you are risking loss of the amount you
have bet, and to have nothing on the line means that you have not
made a bet and therefore have nothing to lose).
Furthermore, typically these questions were just asked once, so many argued
that they were not a good indication of what people would do in real-life
situations in which they had an opportunity to learn from prior mistakes. So
the critique was two-fold (twice as great
or many, the dose is doubled). First, if you raise the stakes people
will take the questions more seriously and choose in a manner more consistent (containing statements or ideas that
are similar)
with optimization. Second, if given a chance to learn, people will get it
right. Often the same person would make both of these critiques, thinking that
they reinforced one another. Of course there is no doubt that the ability to
practice improves performance in most tasks. No one plays well in his first
game of chess, or billiards for that matter. And most people eventually become
at least competent at highly complex tasks such as riding a bike or running
down a flight of stairs. Similarly, the notion that people will pay more
attention when the stakes go up is intuitively appealing. Certainly we pay more
attention when buying a car than when deciding what to order for lunch. But
rather than these two arguments working together, they actually go in opposite
directions. The reason this is so is that, as a rule, the higher the stakes,
the less often we get to do something. Consider the following list of economic
activities: deciding how much milk to buy at the grocery store, choosing a
sweater, buying a car, buying a home, selecting a career, choosing a spouse,
saving for retirement. Most households have mastered (to learn something thoroughly so that you know it or can
do it very well) the art of milk inventory management through trial
and error. Buy too much and it spoils, buy too little and you have to make an
extra trip to the convenience store. But if households do this (say) twice a
week, eventually they figure it out, at least until the children move out of
the house or switch to beer. Few of us buy cars often enough to get very good
at it, and the really big decisions like careers, marriages, and retirement
saving give very little room for learning. So critics can’t have it both ways.
Either the real world is mostly high stakes or it offers myriad opportunities
to learn—not both. Even in domains where there are multiple opportunities to
learn, people may not make the best of those situations. Daniel Kahneman and I
ran an experiment years ago that illustrates this point. (We never published
the results so the details will be sketchy
(not detailed or complete).)
Subjects were given forms that looked something like this:
Heads: 1 2 3
4 5 … 18 19 20
Tails: 1 2 3 4 5 … 18 19 20 (heads or tails refers to the
two sides of a coin)
They were then shown two
large manila envelopes (the Manila
envelope is a specific colored envelope designed for
transporting documents. It is made of thick,
durable Manila paper and sized so that full sheets of
paper can fit inside without being folded)
that were labeled Heads and
Tails and were shown that each envelope contained 20 poker chips numbered from
1 to 20. The experimenter said he would first flip a coin (to decide something by throwing a coin up in the air and
seeing which side is shown after it lands, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAiNqQi30-Y )
and then, depending on the outcome, choose a poker chip from the respective
envelope. Subjects were allowed to circle five numbers on their form, dividing
their choices as they wished between the heads and tails rows. When the
experimenter selected a chip and announced the result, for example “Heads, 17”
any subject who had circled the winning coin face and number would win some
money. Specifically, if the chip came from the Heads
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