Colin Camerer

Colin Camerer

Colin Camerer is a behavioural economist at Caltech and the first author of the 1989 paper in the Journal of Political Economy that introduced the term "curse of knowledge". With George Loewenstein and Martin Weber, he showed experimentally that better-informed people cannot set aside what they know when judging what others know. He also led large replication projects in experimental economics and in social science. This page covers those two strands, as far as the sources read here support.

Who they are

The vault describes Camerer as a behavioural economist at Caltech. He is first author of the three papers on this page, and his name appears across behavioural economics, including meta-analytic and replication work cited elsewhere on this site. Biographical details beyond his field and institution are not established here.

Key papers

Key ideas

The curse of knowledge

The 1989 paper challenged a quiet assumption in economic models of asymmetric information, that a better-informed person can reproduce the judgement of a less-informed one. In the authors' experiments, better-informed people could not set their extra knowledge aside, even when doing so would have paid. The summary the authors give is that more information is not always better. Comparing individuals judging alone with judgements made in markets, they found that markets cut the error by about half and did not remove it.

The authors argued that the finding matters for bargaining, strategic behaviour by firms, principal-agent problems and choice under uncertainty. It later became a general name for a failure of perspective-taking, and it reached education, writing and design under related labels such as the expert blind spot.

Replication as a method

Camerer's replication projects test whether published experimental findings hold when run again by other teams. They are cited on this site for a different purpose from the curse of knowledge: to show that the reliability of published findings can be measured, and that the answer differs from study to study. The curse of knowledge itself has been through that process in one paradigm. A 2014 replication of a false-belief version found the direction of the effect but a size less than half the original.

Sources

  1. Camerer, C., Loewenstein, G., & Weber, M. (1989). 'The curse of knowledge in economic settings: An experimental analysis.' Journal of Political Economy, 97(5), 1232-1254. doi:10.1086/261651
  2. Camerer, C. F., et al. (2016). Replication of laboratory experiments in economics. Science, 351(6280), 1433-1436.
  3. Camerer, C. F., et al. (2018). 'Evaluating the replicability of social science experiments in Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015.' Nature Human Behaviour, 2, 637-644. doi:10.1038/s41562-018-0399-z
  4. Shotton, R. (2018). The Choice Factory, Bias 22, pp. 147 to 152.
  5. Ryskin, R. A., & Brown-Schmidt, S. (2014). 'Do adults show a curse of knowledge in false-belief reasoning? A robust estimate of the true effect size.' PLoS ONE, 9(3), e92406. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0092406