Beliefs, Actions, and Rationality in Strategical Decisions: A Quantum Approach
It seems difficult to define what is rational for strategical decisions (involving interactions among intelligent actors) in a way that does not eventually run directly counter to how human decision makers actually behave. For example, definitions formulated by economists, including the Nash and subgame perfect equilibrium formulations, are problematic with respect to findings from experimental economics using mainstream games, such as the prisoner’s dilemma game and the centipede game. These findings call for new ideas about strategic decision making, and one new approach comes from quantum computing, information, and probability theory. This talk reviews puzzling findings from past empirical work using social economic games that motivate a consideration of a quantum approach to strategic decision making. It also reviews previous attempts to account for these puzzling findings using quantum cognition theories and models. We conducted a new experiment using a centipede game to test existing quantum models of strategic decision making. The belief-action entanglement model provides the best account for the new experimental findings. We will discuss the implications of the new approach to strategical decision making.
If you require an accommodation such as live captioning or interpretation to participate in this event, please contact Kyle McCray, mccray.44@osu.edu. Requests made two weeks before the event will generally allow us to provide seamless access, but the university will make every effort to meet requests made after this date.
Speaker
Dr. Zheng Joyce Wang is a Professor in the School of Communication, the Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, and the Translational Data Analytics. Her research is in the areas of information processing, communication, and decision-making, with a focus on dynamic and context effects. The implications of her research are the design of more effective messages, media platforms, and communication campaigns, and better decision aids and shared decision-making. One of the overarching goals of her work is to help solve the problem of connecting and integrating short-term and long-term effects of messages and media on emotion, cognition, and decision. Another overarching goal is to build probabilistic and dynamic systems based on quantum rather than traditional classical probability principles to account for various puzzling, “irrational” phenomena in decision and cognition. Her research has been supported by U.S. National Science Foundation and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
First Fridays
This event is part of the Mershon Center's First Fridays seminars featuring research by Mershon Center affiliates and taking place the first Friday of each month. We welcome Mershon-affiliated faculty and graduate students, as well as the broader university community, to find out more about our work.
