Econ Papers Daily / 期刊论文
筛选决策中条件推理的失败
Failures of contingent reasoning in screening decisions
摘要
Screening decisions—choosing a costly action that reveals information about an unknown quality—can be crucial in various situations, such as hiring workers or designing policies. Choosing whether to screen can be difficult because it requires recognizing and trading off the benefits of information with the costs of getting it. We investigate whether people recognize when the benefits of screening dominate its costs and what causes them to choose otherwise. Our online experiment simulates a hiring scenario with an initial trial task. Participants can first reveal candidates’ quality at a small cost and then choose which candidate to hire. Most participants choose the dominated task that does not reveal the candidates’ quality, and this mistake persists even with experience and feedback. We show that this insufficient screening is driven by failures to anticipate inference and plan the full strategy.
中文摘要
筛选决策——即选择一项 costly action（代价高昂的行动）以揭示关于未知质量的信息——在多种情境中至关重要，例如招聘员工或设计政策。决定是否进行筛选可能很困难，因为这需要识别信息带来的收益与获取信息的成本，并在二者之间进行权衡。我们研究人们是否能认识到筛选的收益何时超过其成本，以及是什么导致他们做出其他选择。我们的在线实验模拟了一个带有初始试用任务的招聘场景。参与者可以先以较小的成本揭示候选人的质量，然后选择聘用哪位候选人。大多数参与者选择了不揭示候选人质量的被支配任务，而且即使经过经验和反馈，这一错误仍然存在。我们表明，这种筛选不足是由未能预见推断并规划完整策略所驱动的。