PhD defence B. (Benjamin) Tereick

How do we provide incentives to receive well-informed opinions on difficult questions? And when given such opinions, how do we aggregate them to determine our decision? In four chapters, this dissertation centers around those two questions, arguing that optimal incentives and aggregation schemes can even be found for questions for which it may be hard to ever know the answer, like questions about psychological states, counterfactuals, or the far future. The theoretical proposals are tested in experiments, testing how well the Bayesian decision-makers in the models describe the decision-making of real humans who follow heuristics and are prone to behavioural biases.

Due to corona, the PhD defences do not take place publicly in the usual way in the Senate Hall or in the Professor Andries Querido Room. The candidates will defend their dissertation either in a small group or online.