Rationality Enhancement Ph.D. Thesis 2018

Beyond Bounded Rationality: Reverse-Engineering and Enhancing Human Intelligence

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Rationality Enhancement

Bad decisions can have devastating consequences: There is a vast body of literature claiming that human judgment and decision-making are riddled with numerous systematic violations of the rules of logic, probability theory, and expected utility theory. The discovery of these cognitive biases in the 1970s (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974) made people question the concept of Homo sapiens as the rational animal, profoundly shaking the foundations of economics and rational models in the cognitive, neural, and social sciences. Four decades later, these disciplines still lack a rigorous theoretical foundation for explaining and remedying people’s cognitive biases. To solve this problem, my dissertation offers a mathematically precise theory of bounded rationality and demonstrates how it can be leveraged to elucidate the cognitive mechanisms of judgment and decision-making (Part 1) and to help people make better decisions (Part 2).

Award: (Glushko Prize 2020)
Author(s): Falk Lieder
Year: 2018
Bibtex Type: Ph.D. Thesis (phdthesis)
Award Paper: Glushko Prize 2020
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.16888.55041
Electronic Archiving: grant_archive
Language: English
School: University of California, Berkeley
State: Published
Attachments:

BibTex

@phdthesis{lieder2018beyond,
  title = {Beyond Bounded Rationality: Reverse-Engineering and Enhancing Human Intelligence},
  aword_paper = {Glushko Prize 2020},
  abstract = {Bad decisions can have devastating consequences: There is a vast body of literature claiming that
  human judgment and decision-making are riddled with numerous systematic violations of the
  rules of logic, probability theory, and expected utility theory. The discovery of these cognitive
  biases in the 1970s (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974) made people question the concept of Homo
  sapiens as the rational animal, profoundly shaking the foundations of economics and rational
  models in the cognitive, neural, and social sciences. Four decades later, these disciplines still
  lack a rigorous theoretical foundation for explaining and remedying people’s cognitive biases.
  To solve this problem, my dissertation offers a mathematically precise theory of bounded
  rationality and demonstrates how it can be leveraged to elucidate the cognitive mechanisms of
  judgment and decision-making (Part 1) and to help people make better decisions (Part 2).},
  school = {{University of California, Berkeley}},
  year = {2018},
  slug = {lieder2018beyond},
  author = {Lieder, Falk}
}