Cognitive Uncertainty
通过风险选择、信念形成和经济变量预测等实验，证明认知不确定性（人们对自身事前效用最大化决策的主观不确定感）能预测多种系统性偏差，并将概率加权、基准率不敏感等看似不同的行为规律统一起来。
Abstract This article documents the economic relevance of measuring cognitive uncertainty: people’s subjective uncertainty over their ex ante utility-maximizing decision. In a series of experiments on choice under risk, the formation of beliefs, and forecasts of economic variables, we show that cognitive uncertainty predicts various systematic biases in economic decisions. When people are cognitively uncertain—either endogenously or because the problem is designed to be complex—their decisions are heavily attenuated functions of objective probabilities, which gives rise to average behavior that is regressive to an intermediate option. This insight ties together a wide range of empirical regularities in behavioral economics that are typically viewed as distinct phenomena or even as reflecting preferences, including the probability weighting function in choice under risk; base rate insensitivity, conservatism, and sample size effects in belief updating; and predictable overoptimism and -pessimism in forecasts of economic variables. Our results offer a blueprint for how a simple measurement of cognitive uncertainty generates novel insights about what people find complex and how they respond to it.