Africa Institute for Research in Economics and Social Sciences organizes a seminar on Thursday, October 27th at 12:30 p.m at the Rabat Campus of Mohammed VI Polytechnic University under the theme "Ambiguity Attitudes and Learning''.

Our guest speaker for this event is Mohamed ABDELLAOUI, Affiliate Professor at the Faculty of Governance, Economics and Social Sciences.

ABSTRACT

We investigate learning in ambiguous situations where subjects sample from an unknown distribution before betting on it. Varying the number of draws prior to choice allows us to “scan” ambiguity attitudes and perceptions across differing amounts of information. Biseparately eliciting posterior beliefs, we disentangle the impact of learning on ambiguity attitude from its impact on beliefs, including divergences from Bayesian update. Both attitude to and perception of ambiguity are impacted by learning, in the direction of ambiguity neutrality. Moreover, the impact of these changes on preferences is comparable to that of the divergence from Bayesian update, especially at small sample sizes. These findings emerge under both the smooth ambiguity model and biseparable preferences. To obtain these results, we perform what to our knowledge is the first direct choice-based elicitation of the ambiguity-attitude component of the smooth ambiguity model involving an explicit and separate control for beliefs.