What Comes to Mind

• Authors: Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer
• Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 125, No. 4, 1399--1433, January 2010

We present a model of intuitive inference, called “local thinking,” in which an agent combines data received from the external world with information retrieved from memory to evaluate a hypothesis. In this model, selected and limited recall of information follows a version of the representativeness heuristic. The model can account for some of the evidence on judgment biases, including conjunction and disjunction fallacies, but also for several anomalies related to demand for insurance.