A fundamental postulate of standard economics is that preferences are complete, deterministic, and stable across different elicitation contexts. However, in most decisions, individuals need to trade off conflicting objectives, e.g., risk vs. return, time vs. reward, price vs. quality, and efficiency vs. equality. These trade-offs are difficult, and thus individuals may be uncertain about their preferences. Under preference uncertainty, individuals may exhibit stochastic choice by changing their decisions across repeated choices or by reporting a range of possible values when evaluating an asset. This PhD thesis contributes to the empirical investigation of preference uncertainty by proposing novel methods to reveal and measure it with incentives. These methods are applied in economic experiments to examine whether preference uncertainty can explain two economic anomalies: preference reversal and present bias.
Liu Shi was born in 1995, in Xi’an, China. She obtained her Bachelor's degree in Economics from Xi’an Jiaotong University in 2017 and her Master’s degree in Finance from the same institution in 2019. In September 2019, she began her doctoral studies in Behavioral Economics at uu77’s Institute for Management Research. Her research focuses on expanding the understanding of preference uncertainty and improving individuals’ decision-making.