Menglong (Vincent) Guan

Biography

Menglong (Vincent) Guan received his BA in Economics from Xiamen University and is currently a PhD candidate in Economics at the University of California Santa Barbara. His research is in Behavioral and Experimental Economics and Applied Microeconomic Theory, focusing on information economics, complexity, and bounded rationality.

Job Market Paper Abstract

"Choosing Between Information Bundles"

This paper presents an experimental study on how people choose sets of information sources (referred to as information bundles). In binary choices between information bundles, subjects deviate from the rational benchmark by failing to adequately consider the joint information content of the information sources within a bundle. The deviation can not be attributed to subjects’ mistakes in using or evaluating bundles. Instead, it is primarily driven by subjects’ tendency to employ a simple but imperfect heuristic, denoted as “choice simplification”, when making choices. Under this heuristic, subjects incorrectly reduce a choice between two bundles to a choice between two single information sources, without considering the joint information content of the sources within a bundle. Notably, choice simplification serves as a robust explanation for the choices between information bundles of all subjects, including those who make perfect use of each information bundle.