Beware of black swans but do not ignore white ones (original) (raw)

Abstract

Uncertainty pervades most aspects of life. From selecting a new technology to choosing a career, decision makers often ignore the outcomes of their decisions. In the last decade a new paradigm has emerged in behavioral decision research in which decisions are “experienced” rather than “described”, as in standard decision theory. The dominant finding from studies using the experience-based paradigm is that decisions from experience exhibit "black swan effect", i.e. the tendency to neglect rare events. Under prospect theory, this results in an experience-description gap. We show that several tentative conclusions can be drawn from our interdisciplinary examination of the putative experience-description gap in decision under uncertainty. Several insights are discussed. First, while the major source of under-weighting of rare events may be sampling error, it is argued that a robust experience-description gap remains when these factors are not at play. Second, the residual expe...

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