Georg Weizsäcker
Georg Weizsäcker is an economist and the second author of Narrow Bracketing and Dominated Choices, published in the American Economic Review in 2009 with Matthew Rabin. The paper reports a real-stakes laboratory replication of Tversky and Kahneman's 1981 pair of decisions, in which 28 per cent of participants chose dominated combinations.
Who they are
Georg Weizsäcker is Professor of Economics at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His fields are experimental and behavioral economics, financial decision making, game theory, decision theory and applied microeconomics. He took his doctorate at Harvard University in 2004, and worked in the economics departments of the London School of Economics and University College London before moving to Berlin.
In Berlin he has been Dean of the DIW Graduate Center and Program Director of BERA, the city's career development program for postdoctoral researchers, and he is Spokesperson of the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Center TRR 190, "Rationality and Competition".
Key papers
Rabin, M., & Weizsäcker, G. (2009). Narrow bracketing and dominated choices. American Economic Review, 99(4), 1508 to 1543. doi:10.1257/aer.99.4.1508.
Key ideas
The paper shows that evaluating decisions separately can lead to a first-order stochastically dominated choice, even for a simple pair of independent binary decisions, unless risk preferences are of the constant absolute risk aversion kind. The authors also calculate the monetary cost of the mistake in terms of the decision maker's preferences, find that a representative survey of hypothetical large-stakes choices gives higher rates of dominated choices than the laboratory, and find that rates vary little with personal characteristics.
Sources
- Rabin, M., & Weizsäcker, G. (2009). Narrow bracketing and dominated choices. American Economic Review, 99(4), 1508 to 1543. doi:10.1257/aer.99.4.1508.
- Berlin School of Economics, member profile of Georg Weizsäcker.