Drew Fudenberg
Economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, best known for work in game theory and learning in games. He appears on this site for a smaller paper: the re-examination, with David Levine and Zacharias Maniadis, of the anchoring demonstration that made the idea famous outside psychology.
Who they are
Fudenberg is a theorist whose main body of work is in game theory, learning and evolutionary dynamics, based at MIT. The anchoring paper sits outside that main line and belongs to a strand of work testing whether well-known experimental findings survive replication under economic conditions, with real stakes and incentives.
This page covers his work rather than his life.
Key papers
Fudenberg, D., Levine, D. K., & Maniadis, Z. (2012). 'On the robustness of anchoring effects in WTP and WTA experiments.' American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 4(2), 131-145.* A re-examination of the anchoring manipulation used by Ariely, Loewenstein and Prelec in 2003, in which participants considered their own identification digits before valuing goods. On common market goods the authors found very weak anchoring effects. On binary lotteries, where a participant can calculate what the item is worth rather than guess, they found none.
Key ideas
The paper is a limit statement. It does not claim anchoring is unreal; it claims that the version in which an arbitrary personal number sets what somebody will pay is fragile, and that the fragility shows up most clearly when the thing being valued has a computable value.
Read alongside Sugden, Zheng and Zizzo, the two papers point the same way. An anchor works on a purchase when it functions as evidence about the price, and stops working when the person has a better route to the answer.
Concepts on this site
Sources
- Fudenberg, D., Levine, D. K., & Maniadis, Z. (2012). On the robustness of anchoring effects in WTP and WTA experiments. American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 4(2), 131-145. doi:10.1257/mic.4.2.131
- Affiliation from the public author record.