Project summary
The application’s unifying theme is cognition. Any decision reflects the information that comes to the decision-maker’s awareness at the moment of making the decision. In turn, this information is the stochastic outcome of a sequence of more or less conscious choices and of awareness manipulation by the third parties. The three parts of this application all are concerned with two factors of limited awareness (cognitive costs and motivates beliefs) and with the application of imperfect cognition to economics.
The various projects can be subsumed into three themes, each with different subprojects:
1- Self-serving beliefs, laws, norms and taboos (expressive function of the laws, taboos, dignity and contracts).
2- Cognition markets and contracts (mechanism design under costly cognition, directing attention in markets and politics).
3- Cognition and individual decision-making (foundations of some non-standard preferences).