ch05不确定性和消费者行为.pptVIP

BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS 5.5 More Complex Preferences ● reference point The point from which an individual makes a consumption decision. ● endowment effect Tendency of individuals to value an item more when they own it than when they do not. ● loss aversion Tendency for individuals to prefer avoiding losses over acquiring gains. ● anchoring Tendency to rely heavily on one prior (suggested) pieces of information when making a decision. Rules of Thumb and Biases in Decision Making BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS 5.5 Probabilities and Uncertainty An important part of decision making under uncertainty is the calculation of expected utility, which requires two pieces of information: a utility value for each outcome (from the utility function) and the probability of each outcome. People are sometimes prone to a bias called the law of small numbers: They tend to overstate the probability that certain events will occur when faced with relatively little information from recent memory. Forming subjective probabilities is not always an easy task and people are generally prone to several biases in the process. Summing Up The basic theory that we learned up to now helps us to understand and evaluate the characteristics of consumer demand and to predict the impact on demand of changes in prices or incomes. The developing field of behavioral economics tries to explain and to elaborate on those situations that are not well explained by the basic consumer model. BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS 5.5 Most cab drivers rent their taxicabs for a fixed daily fee from a company. As with many services, business is highly variable from day to day. How do cabdrivers respond to these variations, many of which are largely unpredictable? A recent study analyzed actual taxicab trip records obtained from the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission for the spring of 1994. The daily fee to rent a taxi was then $76, and gasoline cost about $15 per day. Surprisingly, the researchers found that most drivers driv