讲座题目：Commitment to Thinking（对思考的承诺）

主讲人：王伊然  西南财经大学中国行为经济与行为金融中心

讲座时间：2024年11月21日10:00

讲座地点：学院123

讲座内容摘要：

Faced with a difficult decision, an individual may forego thinking and settle for a mediocre alternative. We model individuals who, anticipating such behavior, may at the ex-ante stage of lower information costs choose to exclude the mediocre option from their set of alternatives so as to compel themselves to better think in the future. Formally, we generalize the standard model of rational inattention by considering an individual with lower subjective costs of information acquisition at the ex-ante stage of choice of a menu than at the ex-post stage of choice from the menu. A novel axiom, weak preference for flexibility, characterizes our most general model and reflects the fundamental trade-off between commitment and flexibility that arises in this setting. Two further axioms, commitment to thinking hard and uniform scaling, characterize the special case when the ex-ante and ex-post cost functions have a linear relationship. Finally, we provide comparative statics results and a principal-agent application.

面对一个困难的决策，个人可能会放弃思考，选择一个平庸的替代方案。我们对预见到这种行为的个人进行建模，他们可能在信息成本较低的事前阶段，选择将平庸的选项从他们的备选方案中排除，以迫使自己在未来更好地思考。正式地，我们通过考虑个人在选择菜单的事前阶段，其信息获取的主观成本低于在事后从菜单中选择时的成本，从而推广了标准的理性忽视模型。一个新的公理——弱灵活性偏好，刻画了我们最一般的模型，反映了在这种情境下出现的承诺与灵活性之间的基本权衡。另外两个公理，努力思考的承诺和统一缩放，刻画了当事前和事后成本函数具有线性关系的特殊情况。最后，我们提供了比较静态的结果和一个委托代理的应用。

主讲人个人信息：

王伊然，西南财经大学中国行为经济与行为金融中心助理教授，博士毕业于罗彻斯特大学经济系。研究领域为决策理论，行为经济学及信息经济学。