Navigating Ambiguity: Imprecise Probabilities and the Updating of Disease Risk Beliefs – Dr. Jason Kerwin

Posted: 2/28/2025 (CSDE Seminar Series)

When: Friday, March 7, 2025 (12:30-1:30PM)

Where: 360 Parrington Hall and on Zoom (register here)

We are looking forward to hosting Jason Kerwin (Economics, UW) on Friday, March 7th in Parrington Hall 360 and on Zoom. This seminar is co-sponsored by the Population Health Initiative. 

Probabilistic risk beliefs are key drivers of economic and health decisions, but people are not always certain about their beliefs. We study these “imprecise probabilities”, also known as ambiguous beliefs. Imprecision is measurable separately from the level of risk beliefs, and higher imprecision leads to more updating of beliefs in response to a randomized information treatment. New information also causes changes in imprecision levels. We can map our data onto both a standard Bayesian model and a version that is designed to handle imprecise probabilities; these models match some features of our data but not all of them. Imprecise probabilities have important implications for our understanding of decision making and for the design of programs intended to change people’s minds.

Jason Kerwin currently a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Economics and a Brimmer Distinguished Scholar at the University of Washington, an Affiliated Professor at J-PAL, and a Research Fellow at IZA. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan, where he was also an Economic Demography Trainee at Michigan’s Population Studies Center. From 2015 to 2024 he was on the faculty of the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota. Jason’s research focuses on understanding the choices people in developing countries make about health, education, employment, and savings. To do this he combines randomized field experiments and other compelling causal inference methods with cutting-edge methods from econometrics and machine learning. Jason has done fieldwork in Malawi, Uganda, India, and Egypt. His papers have been published in journals that include the American Economic Review, the Journal of Econometrics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, and the Journal of Development Economics.