What Comes to Mind

By N. Gennaioli, A. Shleifer. 2010

436 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a model of judgment under uncertainty, in which an agent combines data received from the external world with information retrieved from memory to evaluate a hypothesis. We focus on what comes to mind immediately, as the agent makes quick, intuitive evaluations. Because the automatic retrieval of data from memory is both limited and selected, the agent's evaluations may be severely biased. This framework can account for some of the evidence on heuristics and biases presented by Kahneman and Tversky, including conjunction and disjunction fallacies.

Subfields: General Decision Sciences, Safety Research, Philosophy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e57600f638e636f5fca16adfb00d90335c574240

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Citations in the corpus

Inflation Expectations, Learning and Supermarket Prices: Evidence from Survey Experiments (2017, methodology): “This design is consistent with models of beliefs and expectations formation – for instance, Gennaioli and Shleifer (2010) propose the idea of “local thinking, in which an agent combines data received from the external world with information retrieved from memory to evaluate a hypothesis.””
The Dynamics of Motivated Beliefs (2020, background): “Mullainathan (2002), Gennaioli and Shleifer (2010), Bordalo, Coffman, Gennaioli and Shleifer (2016), and Bordalo, Gennaioli and Shleifer (2017) focus on the role of cognitive limitations in recall and model implications for belief formation and decision-making.”
Carbon Tail Risk (2020, positive): “8 Görgen et al. (2019) create a carbon factor to capture firms’ sensitivity to the transition to a low-carbon economy. Matsumura, Prakash, and Vera-Munoz (2014) find that higher emissions are associated with lower firm values.”
Economics, Fairness and Algorithmic Bias (2020, neutral): “In this literature, diagnostic variables are more likely to “come to mind” (Gennaioli and Shleifer, 2010), and are therefore weighted more heavily in predictions about the characteristics of Floridians.”
Designing Information Provision Experiments (2020, methodology): “17For recent formal models of attention, see work by Bordalo et al. (2016, 2020); Gennaioli and Shleifer (2010).”
A Sparsity-Based Model of Bounded Rationality (2014, positive): “25 Here, the default model is very simple (basically, it is ''do not think about anything''), but it could be enriched, following other models (e.g., Gennaioli and Shleifer 2010).”
Psychology-based Models of Asset Prices and Trading Volume (2018, methodology): “They build on a model of representativeness laid out in Gennaioli and Shleifer (2010) and Bordalo et al. (2014) in which a type t is representative of a group G if the ratio p(t|G) p(t| −G) (11) is high, in other words, if type t is more common within group G than outside it.”
Belief Disagreement and Portfolio Choice (2018, neutral): “9Examples of more general models include Brunnermeier and Parker (2005), Hansen and Sargent (2010), Gennaioli and Shleifer (2010), and Mailath and Samuelson (2020) for example.”
Borrowers under water! Rare disasters, regional banks, and recovery lending (2020, background): “…SMEs appear to have shorter lived memories and remain somewhat ignorant of the possible occurrence of such disastrous events in the longer run, which would be consistent with theories of bounded rationality to explain the insufficient consideration of risk, see Gennaioli and Shleifer (2010, 2012).”
From intention to action: Can nudges help consumers to choose renewable energy? (2014, background): “Following this line of reasoning, Gennaioli and Shleifer (2010) find that a decision maker does not use all available information but relies on what comes to mind.”