Imperfect Perception and Stochastic Choice in Experiments

The branch of psychology that studies how physical objects are perceived by subjects is known as psychophysics. A feature of the experimental design is that the experimenter presents objectively measurable objects that are imperfectly perceived by subjects. The responses are stochastic in that a subject might respond differently in otherwise identical situations. These stochastic choices can be compared to the objectively measurable properties. This Element offers a brief introduction to the topic, explains how psychophysics insights are already present in economics, and describes experimental techniques with the goal that they are useful in the design of economics experiments. Noise is a ubiquitous feature of experimental economics and there is a large strand of economics literature that carefully considers the noise. However, the authors view the psychophysics experimental techniques as uniquely suited to helping experimental economists uncover what is hiding in the noise.

翻譯結果如下:

研究主體如何感知物理物體的心理學分支被稱為心理物理學。實驗設計的一個特點是實驗者呈現客觀可測量的物體，但主體對其感知並不完美。主體的反應是隨機的，即在其他情況下主體可能有不同的反應。這些隨機選擇可以與客觀可測量的特性進行比較。本文簡要介紹了這個主題，解釋了心理物理學洞察力已經存在於經濟學中，並描述了實驗技術，旨在幫助設計經濟學實驗。噪音是實驗經濟學中普遍存在的特點，有大量的經濟學文獻仔細考慮了噪音。然而，作者認為心理物理學實驗技術獨特地適合幫助實驗經濟學家揭示噪音中隱藏的內容。