Essays on Economic Decision Making

This dissertation focuses on exploring individual and strategic decision problems in Economics. I take a different approach in each chapter to capture various aspects of decision problems. An overview of this dissertation is provided in Chapter 1.

Chapter 2 studies an individual's decision making in extensive-form games under ambiguity when the individual is ambiguous about an opponent's moves. In this chapter, a player follows Choquet Expected Utility preferences, since the standard Expected Utility cannot explain the situations of ambiguity. I raise the issue that dynamically inconsistent decision making can be derived in extensive-form games with ambiguity. To cope with this issue, this chapter provides sufficient conditions to recover dynamic consistency.

Chapter 3 analyzes the strategic decision making in signaling games when a player makes an inference about hidden information from the behavioral hypothesis. The Hypothesis Testing Equilibrium (HTE) is proposed to provide an explanation for posterior beliefs from the player. The notion of HTE admits belief updates for all events including zero-probability events. In addition, this chapter introduces well-motivated modifications of HTE.

Finally, Chapter 4 examines a boundedly rational individual who considers selective attributes when making a decision. It is assumed that the individual focuses on a subset of attributes that stand out from a choice set. The selective attributes model can accommodate violations of choice axioms of Independence from Irrelevant Alternative (IIA) and Regularity.