Home | Events | Too good to be True – Individual and Collective Decision-Making with Misleading Signals
Seminar

Too good to be True – Individual and Collective Decision-Making with Misleading Signals

  • Series
    CREED Seminars
  • Speaker(s)
    Sebastian Fehrler (University of Bremen, Germany)
  • Field
    Behavioral Economics
  • Location
    University of Amsterdam, Roeterseilandcampus, room tba
    Amsterdam
  • Date and time

    February 13, 2025
    16:00 - 17:15

Abstract
In today's world, there are many cases, where overwhelming evidence, such as fabricated customer reviews, can result in deceptive conclusions. We experimentally investigate individual and collective decision-making within information structures with correlated signals in one state of the world, where too much evidence has the potential to mislead, necessitating a level of sophistication for rational decision-making. Overall, participants' performance is poor with only small differences in collective and individual decision-making accuracy. Interestingly, the more complex environment tends to encourage greater honesty within heterogeneous groups, as compared to the benchmark setting with independent signals, thus validating a rather subtle game-theoretic prediction.