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    Memory and Representativeness
    03 Jun 2019Working Paper Summaries

    Memory and Representativeness

    by Pedro Bordalo, Katherine Baldiga Coffman, Nicola Gennaioli, Frederik Schwerter, and Andrei Shleifer
    We explore the foundations of individuals’ probabilistic judgments, looking to better understand the sources of systematic errors. We conduct a laboratory experiment where participants view abstract images and are then asked to recall what they saw. We find evidence that interference in episodic memory contributes to biased probabilistic judgments.
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    Author Abstract

    We explore the idea that judgment by representativeness reflects the workings of episodic memory, especially interference. In a new laboratory experiment on cued recall, participants are shown two groups of images with different distributions of colors. We find that i) decreasing the frequency of a given color in one group significantly increases the recalled frequency of that color in the other group and ii) for a fixed set of images, different cues for the same objective distribution entail different interference patterns and different probabilistic assessments. Selective retrieval and interference may offer a foundation for the representativeness heuristic, but more generally for understanding the formation of probability judgments from experienced statistical associations.

    Paper Information

    • Full Working Paper Text
    • Working Paper Publication Date: March 2019
    • HBS Working Paper Number: NBER Working Paper Series, No. 25692
    • Faculty Unit(s): Negotiation, Organizations & Markets
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    Katherine B. Coffman
    Katherine B. Coffman
    Piramal Associate Professor of Business Administration
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