Experimental Economics· 2026Q1
Failures of contingent reasoning in screening decisions
- 0citations
- Q1SCImago
- 2026year
Short summary
Most people fail to screen candidates optimally, choosing costly, uninformative tasks over beneficial ones that reveal quality, even with experience.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Screening decisions require balancing information benefits against acquisition costs.
- Most participants chose dominated, uninformative tasks in a simulated hiring scenario.
- This failure to screen optimally persisted even with experience and feedback.
- The root cause is a failure to anticipate inference and plan a full strategy.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Abstract Screening decisions—choosing a costly action that reveals information about an unknown quality—can be crucial in various situations, such as hiring workers or designing policies. Choosing whether to screen can be difficult because it requires recognizing and trading off the benefits of information with the costs of getting it. We investigate whether people recognize when the benefits of screening dominate its costs and what causes them to choose otherwise. Our online experiment simulates a hiring scenario with an initial trial task. Participants can first reveal candidates’ quality at a small cost and then choose which candidate to hire. Most participants choose the dominated task that does not reveal the candidates’ quality, and this mistake persists even with experience and feedback. We show that this insufficient screening is driven by failures to anticipate inference and plan the full strategy.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Experimental Economics, 2026 · DOI ↗
Continue with a free account
Ask the paper: 3 free questions a day about this paper; save it, get its citation, new summaries every day for your field. Takeaways are Premium.
Continue free on the webSign in with Google or Apple; no card needed. You come back to this paper.
On your phone:
General Decision SciencesDecision Sciences