Abstract
How do people choose economic advice? We develop a set of validated questions on economic policy to examine the persuasiveness of expert versus populist advice. Populists, in our con text, conform to commonly held beliefs, even when wrong. Two computerized advisers suggest answers to each question, and experimental participants are incentivized to choose the most accurate adviser. Do participants choose the high-accuracy adviser (鈥榯he Expert鈥), or the low accuracy one (鈥榯he Charlatan鈥), whose answers are designed to be similar to the modal participant鈥檚? Our participants overwhelmingly choose the Charlatan. Revealing the Charlatan鈥檚 exact modus operandi to debias behavior scarcely helps. Sequential feedback on the correct answer improves choices only slowly and partially. Bayesian choice models fail to explain behavior; a naive choice model akin to reinforcement learning with high inertia 铿乼s behavior well.
Author: Zacharias Maniadi