IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cth/wpaper/gru_2018_014.html

Biased Beliefs About Random Samples: Evidence from Two Integrated Experiments

Author

Listed:
  • Daniel J. Benjamin

    (University of Southern California and NBER)

  • Don A. Moore

    (University of California at Berkeley)

  • Matthew Rabin

    (Harvard University)

Abstract

We report two incentivized experiments on four errors in reasoning about random samples: the Law of Small Numbers, Non-Belief in the Law of Large Numbers, exact representativeness, and “bin effects.” We control for a variety of confounds that constrain prior work, test predictions of existing models, and assess the magnitudes of the biases. By asking each participant many different questions about the same data, we disentangle the biases from possible rational alternative interpretations. We find that no coherent model could jointly rationalize people’s beliefs about random sequences with their beliefs about distributions of outcomes.

Suggested Citation

  • Daniel J. Benjamin & Don A. Moore & Matthew Rabin, 2018. "Biased Beliefs About Random Samples: Evidence from Two Integrated Experiments," GRU Working Paper Series GRU_2018_014, City University of Hong Kong, Department of Economics and Finance, Global Research Unit.
    • Handle: RePEc:cth:wpaper:gru_2018_014
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cb.cityu.edu.hk/ef/doc/GRU/WPS/GRU%232018-014%20Benjamin.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Ingar Haaland & Christopher Roth & Johannes Wohlfart, 2023. "Designing Information Provision Experiments," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 61(1), pages 3-40, March.
    3. Victor Stango & Jonathan Zinman, 2019. "We Are All Behavioral, More or Less: Measuring and Using Consumer-Level Behavioral Sufficient Statistics," Working Papers 19-14, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
    4. Little, Andrew T., 2022. "Information Theory and Biased Beliefs," OSF Preprints vfqy2, Center for Open Science.
    5. repec:osf:osfxxx:vfqy2_v1 is not listed on IDEAS
    6. Elchin Suleymanov, 2025. "Entropy Regularized Belief Reporting," Papers 2506.22649, arXiv.org, revised Nov 2025.
    7. Eyting, Markus & Schmidt, Patrick, 2021. "Belief elicitation with multiple point predictions," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 135(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • B49 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - Economic Methodology - - - Other

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cth:wpaper:gru_2018_014. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: GRU The email address of this maintainer does not seem to be valid anymore. Please ask GRU to update the entry or send us the correct address (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/decithk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.