Background and interestsI am a PhD student at CREED (Amsterdam School of Economics) since September 2015 under the supervision of Theo Offerman. I graduated from the Tinbergen Institute's MPhil in Economics program. I did my undergraduate in Management, Philosophy and Economics at the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management. Since July 2015, I am a member of the EpiCenter (Research Center for Epistemic Game Theory) at Maastricht University. I am currently interested in Judgement and Decision-Making, Evolutionary Game Theory, Epistemic and Psychological Game Theory. I find projects in these areas most interesting if theories come back-to-back with experimental testing and measurement. My philosophical interests lie in Kantian Philosophy and especially his (rule-based) decision theory.
PUBLICATIONS 2018
Jagau, Stephan and Theo Offerman (2018) Defaults, normative anchors and the occurrence of risky and cautious shifts Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 56, 211-236 PDF-file Link to article Choice shifts occur when individuals advocate a risky (safe) decision when acting as part of a group even though they prefer a safe (risky) decision when acting as individuals. Even though research in psychology and economics has produced a mass of evidence on this puzzling phenomenon,
there is no agreement about which mechanism produces choice shifts. In an experiment, we investigate the performance of two prominent mechanisms that have been proposed to explain the phenomenon; (i)rank-dependent utility and (ii) a desire to conform to the wishes of the majority.
The evidence provides clear support for the conformity explanation.
PUBLICATIONS 2017
Jagau, Stephan and Matthijs van Veelen (2017) A general evolutionary framework for the role of intuition and deliberation in cooperation Nature Human Behaviour 1, 0152 (2017) Link to article In the experimental and theoretical literature on social heuristics, the case has been made for dual-process cooperation. Empirical evidence is thought to be consistent with the idea that people tend to be nice before thinking twice. A recent theoretical paper moreover suggests that this is also the type of dual process one would expect from evolution. In ‘Intuition, deliberation, and the evolution of cooperation’ by Bear and Rand, natural selection never favours agents who use deliberation to override the impulse to defect, while deliberation can be favoured if it serves to undermine cooperation in interactions without future repercussions. Here we show that this conclusion depends on a seemingly innocuous assumption about the distribution of the costs of deliberation, and that with different distributions, dual-process defectors can also evolve. Dual-process defectors intuitively defect, but use deliberation to switch to cooperation when it is in their self-interest to do so (that is, when future repercussions exist). The more general model also shows that there is a variety of strategies that combine intuition and deliberation with Bayesian learning and strategic ignorance. Our results thereby unify and generalize findings from different, seemingly unrelated parts of the literature. 