Thomas Graeber’s research while affiliated with Harvard University and other places

... At the same time, although most notions of complexity somehow reflect the difficulty to handle a task -or the associated cost-it is also the case that complexity is a term which is traditionally used in a casual way, without consensus on what exactly it means (Gabaix and Graeber, 2024). This lack of a widely accepted precise definition can possibly explain why scholars have also focused on measuring complexity, which can be in turn serve as a proxy for different types of complexity (Oprea, 2024a). 1 Common ways to measure complexity include direct metrics (Oprea, 2020), behavioral metrics (Banovetz and Oprea, 2023), and most importantly for this paper belief-based metrics (Enke and Graeber, 2023;Enke et al., 2024a,b). ...

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A robust measure of complexity

... The authors concluded that discounting in social situations appears to be conceptually different from personal discounting. Chopra et al. (2024) also investigated the temporal structure of self-other tradeoffs but used a different design, with substantially longer time frames (up to 1 year) and monetary donations to charity. Interestingly, they found that prosocial decisions in the form of self-other tradeoffs had a distinct temporal profile beyond people's discounting in either domain (self and other when considered separately) and controlling for their atemporal preference for giving in this context. ...

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Intertemporal prosocial behavior: a review and research agenda

... Increased complexity can result in (mental) overload and thus in suboptimal decisions. Negative effects of this nature have been observed in situations with many choice options, complex incentives, or multiple outcomes (see, e.g., ref. 12 for an overview of the effects of complexity on choice). This raises the question of whether an increase in the number of nudges results in (attention) overload and, consequently, worse performance not only on nonreminded, but also on reminded actions. ...

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Spillover effects of reminder nudges in complex environments

... Additionally, internal capabilities and limitations shape corporate engagement in biodiversity and BRD (Krause et al., 2021). In particular, understanding and compiling BRD requires specific knowledge that is not necessarily transferable from other environmental topics; also, there is a lack of expertise among numerous ESG practitioners (Enke et al., 2023;Schumacher, 2022), which may negatively influence BRD. ...

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Assessing biodiversity‐related disclosure: Drivers, outcomes, and financial impacts

... In a second version, agents observe the fundamentals but the cognitive process that translates fundamentals to actions is noisy, reflecting cognitive constraints. The latter explanation has gained attention in the growing literature on cognitive imprecision (Gabaix, 2019;Woodford, 2020;Enke and Graeber, 2023;Enke, Graeber, Oprea, and Yang, 2024), which shows how noisy information processing can account for a wide range of economic phenomena. ...

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Imprecision Attenuates Updating

... Olsen (2016) found that citizens are more likely to recall anecdotal performance information about public services than statistical data. Similarly, Graeber et al. (2024) demonstrate that the effect of statistical information on individuals' perceptions diminishes by 73% within a day, whereas episodic information declines by only 32% in the same period. These findings underscore the enduring power of episodic information in shaping opinions and guiding decisions. ...

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The Influence of Episodic Information on Political Elites: Evidence from Chile

... An important contribution of Behavioral Economics is to study how findings from stylized, simple settings generalize to market settings (e.g. List 2003 ;Enke and Zimmermann 2019 ;Enke, Graeber, and Oprea 2023 ). In this light, our paper studies the generalizability of the replacement logic to markets. ...

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Morals in Multi-Unit Markets

... These anomalies include the willingness to accept (WTA) -willingness to pay (WTP) gap(Dubourg et al., 1994) preference reversals(Butler and Loomes, 2007), stochastic choices(Agranov and Ortoleva, 2017), insensitivity to variation in probabilities(Enke and Graeber, 2023), anomalies in intertemporal choices(Enke and Graeber, 2021), small-stakes risk aversion(Khaw et al., 2021), and many other violations of standard decision theory(Butler and Loomes, 2011). ...

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Measuring decision confidence

... Consideration of others and consideration of the future can be independent drivers of behavior, but there is also evidence that suggests that they are not independent because current behavior can also have future consequences for others. As Chopra et al. (2021) and Kölle & Lauer (2020) argue, one can experience pro-social utility at the time of decision (now) as well as at the time the consequences are experienced by others (in the future). Current behavior then depends on the weight an individual gives to the pro-social utility she anticipates to experience in the future. ...

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Consideration of others and consideration of future consequences predict cooperation in an acute Social Dilemma: An application to COVID-19

... There are two main reasons why SRPs might have a stronger effect under ambiguity. First, when outcome probabilities are uncertain, individuals find it difficult to evaluate information and need to make subjective probability judgments (Enke and Graeber, 2019). In such situations, SRPs are likely to become more important as they are perceived as additional sources of information. ...

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Social Reference Points Shape Decisions Under Uncertainty