2024年3月13日，伟易博行为科学与政策干预交织立异团队举行2024年春季学期第二期（总第二十次）行为科学分享会 。本次分享会约请香港科技大学治理学系助理教授David Hagmann带来题为 “Agent-Selection and Belief Polarization in Distributive Bargaining” 的研究分享 。
分享人 The Speaker
David Hagmann is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Management at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research examines how people’s complex relationship with information leads to decisions that deviate from the standard economic accounts. David’s research shows that people actively avoid information to protect their beliefs, even when the information could help them make better decisions. They distrust people who present opposing arguments and avoid interacting with them in the workplace, but David‘s research finds that sharing self-revealing personal narratives can increase perceived trustworthiness. Avoidance of unpleasant information can also affect whom people select to represent them in contentious negotiations: those who provide them (overly) optimistic forecasts about the outcomes they can achieve. As a result, negotiations through selected agents are more likely to end in impasse than when people negotiate on their own behalf. Wishful thinking also affects people‘s preferences for government policies. “Nudges,” small changes to the environment that do not affect economic incentives, can crowd out support for more heavy-handed, but also more effective, policies, as people hope for quick fixes. Moreover, when people’s attention is drawn to individual behavior, such as recycling, they become less supportive of systemic interventions, such as carbon taxes. Companies may strategically take advantage of such limited attention, which may explain why BP introduced the carbon footprint calculator, and why Coca-Cola is a major funder of research emphasizing the importance of exercise (but not nutrition) for weight loss. David received a BA in Mathematics and Economics from Fordham University, and his MS and PhD in Behavioral Decision Research from Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to joining HKUST, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
分享会 The Seminar
In high stakes negotiations and disputes, the principal parties often retain agents to act on their behalf. Past work suggests that such bargaining too often ends in costly impasse. We present experimental evidence that the agent-selection process which precedes bargaining may be a significant driver of such impasse. We introduce a novel “ultimatum negotiation game” that allows us to establish the counter-factual outcome that would have been achieved had a different agent been selected. We find that principals select agents who provide them with an estimate of the bargaining outcome that is more favorable to their respective position than the optimal choice. The agents sent to the bargaining table are more polarized in their beliefs than are potential agents in general, which increases the rate of impasse. As a consequence, we find that both parties do worse when selecting agents than if they were assigned an agent at random. However, each party would be even worse off if only the other party engaged in agent selection, while they did not. Therefore, we find evidence of aggressive agent selection to the mutual detriment of both parties.
