People make countless decisions every day, from choosing groceries at the supermarket to taking out a mortgage or setting up a retirement plan. Such choices often require assessing risks, comparing options, making difficult trade-offs, and dealing with uncertainty. Economists have long sought to understand how people make such decisions and generally assume that, given certain constraints, people can compare options and choose the best one. In practice, however, people often report having little confidence in their choices, stick with default options out of caution, change their minds, or postpone decisions.
This dissertation contains three chapters on one key factor that influences decision-making behavior: decision complexity. The central idea is that many decisions are difficult. People sometimes do not fully understand the decision-making context (e.g., what exactly the implications of a tax reform are). Or they feel uncertain about the value they assign to options (e.g., in the case of complex financial products). Such forms of complexity can lead people to use heuristics (decision rules), which can result in systematic biases and decision errors. This dissertation examines the role of complexity in three steps, each covered in a separate chapter.
Sara Arts was born on February 11, 1995, in Boxmeer, the Netherlands. In 2016, she earned a bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences from University College Utrecht (Utrecht University), majoring in Economics and Psychology and minoring in Statistics. In 2019, she completed the Research Master’s program in Social and Behavioral Sciences at Tilburg University. After completing her master’s program, she began her doctoral research in the Department of Economics and Business Economics at Radboud University in Nijmegen, under the supervision of Prof. Stefan Zeisberger and Dr. Jianying Qiu. She is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Erasmus School of Health Policy and Management at Erasmus University Rotterdam.