Kenneth Chan

Biography

Kenneth is a Research Fellow at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine at the National University of Singapore. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2024 and a Bachelor of Social Sciences in Economics from the National University of Singapore in 2020. His main area of research examines how people update their beliefs in response to new information, with a focus on understanding how and why people deviate from Bayes’ rule, the optimal benchmark. In his postdoctoral work, he is working on field experiments to study how we can help people make better health-related decisions.

Outside academia, Kenneth has a strong interest in contract bridge, a partnership-based game centered on decision-making under uncertainty. He has represented Singapore and competed semi-professionally in international competitions with several notable finishes. His experience with bridge sparked his research interest in behavioral economics, with a focus on understanding how people make decisions and how we can overcome behavioral pitfalls in our decision-making process.

Job Market Paper Title

"An Axiomatic Model and Test of Belief Updating: Bayes, Grether (1980), and Preservation of MLRP"

Abstract

This paper presents an axiomatic characterization of Bayes’ rule and the Grether (1980) updating rule that is centered around the preservation of the Monotone Likelihood Ratio Property (MLRP). I show that Bayesian updating can be characterized by the preservation of MLRP from signals and the martingale property, while the Grether (1980) model is characterized by the preservation of MLRP from signals and priors. This framework allows us to identify a class of non-Bayesian updating rules where we can obtain useful comparative statics across different signal realizations and prior beliefs in canonical belief updating problems. I also conducted an experiment to test the axioms that can be used to characterize Bayes’ rule to identify why people are non-Bayesian. I find that subjects broadly comply with axioms about the preservation of MLRP, providing validation for the widely used Grether (1980) model.

Keywords: Bayes’ rule, Belief Updating, Montone Likelihood Ratio Property, Mono- tone Comparative Statics, Experiment

JEL Codes: C91, D01, D83, D90