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IZA Discussion Paper No. 6557
May 2012
Why Do People Pay for Useless Advice? Implications of Gambler's and Hot-Hand Fallacies in False-Expert Setting
Nattavudh Powdthavee, Yohanes E. Riyanto

published as 'Would You Pay for Transparently Useless Advice? A Test of Boundaries of Beliefs in the Folly of Predictions' in: Review of Economics and Statistics, 2015, 97 (2), 257 - 272

We investigated experimentally whether people can be induced to believe in a non-existent expert, and subsequently pay for what can only be described as transparently useless advice about future chance events. Consistent with the theoretical predictions made by Rabin (2002) and Rabin and Vayanos (2010), we show empirically that the answer is yes and that the size of the error made systematically by people is large.

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