Behavioral variability of choices versus structural inconsistency of preferences.

Abstract

Theories of rational choice often make the structural consistency assumption that every decision maker’s binary strict preference among choice alternatives forms a strict weak order. Likewise, the very concept of a utility function over lotteries in normative, prescriptive, and descriptive theory is mathematically equivalent to strict weak order preferences over those lotteries, while intransitive heuristic models violate such weak orders. Using new quantitative interdisciplinary methodologies we dissociate variability of choices from structural inconsistency of preferences. We show that laboratory choice behavior among stimuli of a classical “intransitivity” paradigm is, in fact, consistent with variable strict weak order preferences. We find that decision makers act in accordance with a restrictive mathematical model that, for the behavioral sciences, is extraordinarily parsimonious. Our findings suggest that the best place to invest future behavioral decision research is not in the development of new intransitive decision models, but rather in the specification of parsimonious models consistent with strict weak order(s), as well as heuristics and other process models that explain why preferences appear to be weakly ordered.

Stochastic Choice and Preferences for Randomization

“…First, in line with previous results, the vast majority of participants (90 percent) choose different lotteries in the three repetitions of the same question of subjects gave different answers to the same question. Many studies have replicated this result, focusing on choices between risky gambles: Camerer (1989a), Starmer and Sugden (1989), Hey and Orme (1994), Ballinger and Wilcox (1997), Hey (2001), Regenwetter, Dana, and Davis-Stober (2011), and Regenwetter and Davis-Stober (2012). tion when these repetitions are distant from each other.…”

Individual differences in the algebraic structure of preferences

“…Due to the mathematical complexity of higher-order choice structures, studies have used a binary forced choice framework that does not explicitly include indifference, even though indifference is a defining aspect of the lexicographic semiorder structure (see Regenwetter & Davis-Stober, 2012, for an indepth discussion of this limitation). 2.…”

Primary facets of order polytopes

“…The cells record, respectively, the total number of FDI's, and the number of their equivalence classes under relabellings of the elements in [n]. The values come from - Fiorini (2001) for the partial order polytope P n PO ; -Regenwetter & Davis-Stober (2012a) for the interval order polytope P n IO and for the semiorder polytope P n SO ; -Fiorini (2001), Fiorini & Fishburn (2004) and Regenwetter & Davis-Stober (2012b) for the (strict) weak order polytope P n SWO ;…”

“…The strict weak order polytope P n SWO (Regenwetter & Davis-Stober, 2012b) is closely linked to still another polytope, the weak order polytope P n WO (studied in Doignon & Fiorini, 2002;Fiorini & Fishburn, 2004;Regenwetter & Davis-Stober, 2008). A weak order (or complete preorder) on [n] is a relation which is reflexive, transitive and total.…”