Developmental change in partition dependent resource allocation behavior

Abstract

Partition dependence, the tendency to distribute choices differently based on the way options are grouped, has important implications for decision making. This phenomenon, observed in adults across a variety of contexts such as allocating resources or making selections from a menu of items, can bias decision makers toward some choices and away from others. Only one study to date (Reichelson, Zax, Patalano, & Barth, 2019) has investigated the developmental trajectory of this phenomenon. In the current study we investigate children's and adults' susceptibility to partitioning effects in a child-friendly resource allocation task. In Experiment 1 (N = 80), adults distributed 12 food tokens to animals at the zoo. Based on previous findings that older children show weaker partition dependence in this task, we predicted that adults might exhibit reduced partition dependent behavior: they showed none. In Experiment 2 (N = 272), we used a less transparent task with only five food tokens, predicting that both adults and children (ages 3-10 years) would show partition dependence. Children, but not adults, made partition dependent resource allocations, with younger children exhibiting greater effects than older children. These experiments provide further evidence that children's decisions, like adults' (in other tasks), are influenced by the arbitrary partitioning of the available options. This work supports previous findings that younger children may be more susceptible to these effects, and maps developmental change in partition dependent behavior from early childhood to adulthood on this child-friendly partition dependence task.

The impact of tone management on investor judgments: evidence from ICFR reports

“…Affect-as-information theory (Clore et al , 2001) and partition dependence theory (Williams et al , 2020) motivate the hypotheses of this study. Nonprofessional investors are likely to rely on their affective reactions to the tone of the details describing the ICFR in their evaluation of the company (Elliott et al , 2013).…”

“…The effect predicted in H1 is likely mediated by the negative tone’s impact on investors’ perceptions of the individual parts of the material weakness. Partition dependence theory suggests that a person’s evaluation of an event is dependent on how an event space is divided up and that people tend to automatically adopt the event space with which they are presented (Williams et al , 2020). For example, Xing et al (2020) found that students’ allocation of financial aid to income groups depended on how the income groups were divided insomuch that students allocated more financial aid to the below $75,000 income group when that group was presented with more distinct income categories than when that income group was only presented as a single category.…”