| This thesis consists of three interrelated essays analyzing, methodologically and at an applied level, some of the contributions that cognitive science can offer to economics for the understanding of human decision-making. Although the limitations of the rational economic man are - and have been - central to behavioral economics, these essays argue that cognitive science can improve and further extend the different approaches used within this relatively new field of economics. The first chapter or essay provides a methodological and historical account of the relationship between economics and cognitive psychology, while addressing the main limitations of the rational economic agent model. Chapter 2 and 3 comprise applied work in the field of health economics based on Herbert Simon's idea of bounded rationality. More specifically, the last two essays investigate how consumers make decisions when buying health insurance at the NY health exchange as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA); as well as how changes in the design of the website may help consumers to make more informed decisions. The thesis uses a well-known empirical method in the cognitive science known as "protocol analysis" and a computer simulation to study the effects of information design on decision-making. The lab study designed in Chapter 2 found that key concepts, such as working memory limitation and heuristics, do help to explain how consumers buy health insurance at the marketplace. The computer simulation exercise in Chapter 3 found that, using different customer profiles, simple changes can facilitate the process of decision-making by potentially reducing some of the user's computational and cognitive efforts. |
