Speaker: Colin Camerer, California Institute of Technology
We measure and study visual salience in two-player games, in which players both prefer to match choices of locations or one prefers match and the other mismatch (hide-and-seek). Visual salience is predicted a priori from a computational algorithm based on principles from theoretical neuroscience and previously calibrated by human free gaze data. Salience is a strong predictor of choices, which results in a matching rate of 64% in two samples. Both seekers and hiders choose salient locations more often, though seekers also choose low-salience locations. The result is a “seeker’s advantage” in which seekers win about 9% of the games, compared to a mixed-Nash benchmark of 7%. A salience-perturbed cognitive hierarchy (SCH) model is estimated from the hide-and-seek data. Those estimated parameters accurately predict the choice-salience relation in the matching games.
Colin Camerer is the Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Finance and Economics at the California Institute of Technology (located in Pasadena, California), where he teaches cognitive psychology and economics. Camerer earned a BA degree in quantitative studies from Johns Hopkins in 1977, and an MBA in finance (1979) and a Ph.D. in decision theory (1981, at age 22) from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Before coming to Caltech in 1994, Camerer worked at the Kellogg, Wharton, and University of Chicago business schools. He studies both behavioral and experimental economics.
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The Cognition and Decision Seminar Series is sponsored by the Program for Economic Research and the Center for Decision Sciences.
