"Random choice with status quo bias"

Abstract :

This is a preliminary project, joint with Tigran Melkonyan (Alabama) and Zvi Safra (Warwick), aiming to introduce status quo bias (and subsequently other types of framings or nudges) into random choice models. Existing models of status quo bias are cast in a deterministic choice framework and, consequently, the status quo often has an extreme effect on choice. Adopting a random choice setting therefore seems more plausible. I will first review seminal papers by Masatlioglu and Ok on deterministic status quo bias (JET 2005 ; ReStud 2013) as well as Gul and Pesendorfer on the random expected utility model (ECTA 2006). I will then present our framework, drawing on the above papers, as well as the result we conjecture and our proof strategy.