@article{6e2f2e15a8da4f74a1aff9a9650b2ac7,
title = "Cognitive sophistication and deliberation times",
abstract = "Differences in cognitive sophistication and effort are at the root of behavioral heterogeneity in economics. To explain this heterogeneity, behavioral models assume that certain choices indicate higher cognitive effort. A fundamental problem with this approach is that observing a choice does not reveal how the choice is made, and hence choice data is insufficient to establish the link between cognitive effort and behavior. We show that deliberation times provide an individually-measurable correlate of cognitive effort. We test a model of heterogeneous cognitive depth, incorporating stylized facts from the psychophysical literature, which makes predictions on the relation between choices, cognitive effort, incentives, and deliberation times. We confirm the predicted relations experimentally in different kinds of games.",
keywords = "Cognitive effort, Cognitive sophistication, Deliberation times, Depth of reasoning, Heterogeneity, Iterative reasoning",
author = "Carlos Al{\'o}s-Ferrer and Johannes Buckenmaier",
note = "Funding Information: We thank the co-editor and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. We are grateful to Larbi Alaoui, Colin Camerer, Georg Kirchsteiger, Nick Netzer, Antonio Penta, Leonidas Spiliopoulos and seminar participants at ECARES (Universit{\'e} Libre de Bruxelles), Royal Holloway (University of London), the 16th SAET Conference in Faro, the 13th Annual Conference of the NeuroPsychoEconomics Association in Antwerp, the 14th PsychoEconomics Workshop in Konstanz, the 3rd Motivation and Self-control Symposium in Cologne, and the 2018 conference in honor of Carmen Herrero in Alicante, for helpful comments and suggestions. Johannes Buckenmaier was financed by the German Research Foundation (DFG) through research project AL-1169/5-1 and the research unit “Psychoeconomics” (FOR 1882). The experiment reported in this paper complied with conventions in experimental economics and the ethical norms and guidelines of the Cologne Laboratory for Economic Research (CLER). The Department of Economics at the University of Cologne thanks the German Research Foundation (DFG) for financial help to build the CLER. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2020, The Author(s).",
year = "2020",
doi = "10.1007/s10683-020-09672-w",
language = "English (US)",
journal = "Experimental Economics",
issn = "1386-4157",
publisher = "Springer New York",
}