Belief updating: does the ‘good-news, bad-news’ asymmetry extend to purely financial domains?
实验检验在金融决策中人们是否对好消息和坏消息有不对称的信念更新，结果发现平均而言更新接近贝叶斯基准，但个体间存在异质性。
Abstract Bayes’ statistical rule remains the status quo for modeling belief updating in both normative and descriptive models of behavior under uncertainty. Some recent research has questioned the use of Bayes’ rule in descriptive models of behavior, presenting evidence that people overweight ‘good news’ relative to ‘bad news’ when updating ego-relevant beliefs. In this paper, we present experimental evidence testing whether this ‘good-news, bad-news’ effect is present in a financial decision making context (i.e. a domain that is important for understanding much economic decision making). We find no evidence of asymmetric updating in this domain. In contrast, in our experiment, belief updating is close to the Bayesian benchmark on average. However, we show that this average behavior masks substantial heterogeneity in individual updating behavior. We find no evidence in support of a sizeable subgroup of asymmetric updators.