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Decision Sciences› General Decision Sciences› Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics

Behavioral economics — Asymmetric ('good news, bad news') belief updating

Submitted 2026-10-22

Field: Decision Sciences › General Decision SciencesType: No effect foundArea: behavioral economicsTarget: Asymmetric ('good news, bad news') belief updatingStage: full study

Hypothesis

People would overweight good news relative to bad news when updating beliefs about purely financial outcomes, as found for ego-relevant beliefs.

What failed

In a laboratory experiment on financial beliefs, there was no evidence of asymmetric updating: on average, updating was close to the Bayesian benchmark, and no sizeable subgroup of asymmetric updaters was found despite substantial individual heterogeneity.

Broken assumption

The good-news/bad-news updating asymmetry seen for ego-relevant beliefs extends to purely financial beliefs.

Why

The paper reports that the asymmetry did not appear in this financial domain; it does not claim a mechanism for why it is absent.

From the published paper: Barron et al. Experimental Economics, 2020. ↗CC BY

Research ideas from this failure

Unvetted lead — read the papers

New hypotheses this failure suggests, each with a crucial experiment, a rival explanation of the original result, and the papers it rests on. Written by AI from paper titles and abstracts found on OpenAlex (and Europe PMC, for life and health sciences).

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Links in published research

Where this experiment's genes are known to matter outside its own research area, and the papers behind those links. Sources: Open Targets Platform and Europe PMC.