Martin Weber

Who they are

The vault records Martin Weber as an economist and as a co-author of one paper on this site. His affiliation, career and other publications have not been checked against a source here, and no claim is made about them. The paper is the only record this page rests on.

Key papers

Key ideas

What the 1989 paper tested

The paper examined a quiet assumption in economic models of asymmetric information: that a better-informed person can reproduce the judgement of a less-informed one. If that held, extra knowledge would never get in the way of predicting what others think. The authors' experiments found that it does. Better-informed people often could not set their private information aside, even when doing so would have benefited them, and the authors summarised the point as "more information is not always better".

The experiments compared judgements made by individuals acting alone with judgements made in market settings. Market forces reduced the error by roughly half and did not eliminate it. The authors argued that the result matters for bargaining, strategic behaviour by firms, principal-agent problems and choice under uncertainty.

Where the idea went

The name outlived the setting. Newton's 1990 tapping study, a 1999 study of experts predicting novice performance, and later work in education and data visualisation use the same idea with different tasks. A 2014 replication of a false-belief version found the direction of the effect but a size less than half the original. The 1989 experiments themselves were economic ones, and they should be read in that setting.

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