Friday, August 27, 2010

Maybe we are more like Homer Simpson than Spock

I saw Juan Carrillo of the USC economics department present a very nice paper testing auction theory using experimental data. The only problem was that the people in the experiment were Cal Tech students, who are not exactly representative. But even Cal Tech students, while likely more rational than the general population, and who certainly understand experiments better than the general population, are still far less than perfectly rational.