Can asymmetric subjective opportunity cost effect explain impatience in intertemporal choice? A replication study
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2019, Vol 14, Issue 2
Abstract
In “The value of nothing: asymmetric attention to opportunity costs drives intertemporal decision making” Read, Olivola and Hardisty (2017) proposed an asymmetric subjective opportunity cost (ASOC) effect to explain and predict why impatience can be detected in intertemporal choice. This work deserves to be replicated and extended for its novel and potentially important findings. The present study aimed to examine the reliability and robustness of the evidence presented by Read et al. by conducting precise replications of their key findings in Study 1. The ASOC effect (Read, et al., 2017) was important for expanding its application and reported to be typically stronger when baseline larger-but-later option (LL) and smaller-but-sooner option (SS) preferences were closer to 50% in the authors’ original condition. Therefore, the present study also aimed to replicate and test the ASOC effect when baseline LL preferences were higher or lower than those in the original condition. We intended to set two additional conditions wherein either LL or SS is more obviously favored (i.e., baseline LL preferences were higher or lower than those in the original condition) by respectively applying the common difference effect (Kirby & Herrnstein, 1995) and the unit effect (Burson, Larrick & Lynch Jr., 2009; Pandelaere, Briers & Lembregts, 2011). Having successfully generated two more obviously favored conditions, the ASOC effect was replicated and confirmed under the original condition and one additional condition wherein SS was more obviously favored. However, the ASOC effect was not detected under the other additional condition wherein LL was more obviously favored. The implications of these findings were discussed.
Authors and Affiliations
Si-Chu Shen, Yuan-Na Huang, Cheng-Ming Jiang and Shu Li
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP678412
- DOI -
- Views 146
- Downloads 0
Anti-social motives explain increased risk aversion for others in decisions from experience
When deciding for others based on explicitly described odds and outcomes, people often have different risk preferences for others than for themselves. In two pre-registered experiments, we examine risk preference for oth...
Glad to be sad, and other examples of benign masochism
We provide systematic evidence for the range and importance of hedonic reversals as a major source of pleasure, and incorporate these findings into the theory of benign masochism. Twenty-nine different initially aversive...
The wisdom of ignorant crowds: Predicting sport outcomes by mere recognition
The collective recognition heuristic is a simple forecasting heuristic that bets on the fact that people’s recognition knowledge of names is a proxy for their competitiveness: In sports, it predicts that the better-known...
The role of cognitive reflection in decision making: Evidence from Pakistani managers
Assessing how managers discount and evaluate risks is crucial in designing effective managerial policies. In this work, we examine whether risk preferences (RP; both in the domains of gain and loss) and time preferences...
Bullshit makes the art grow profounder
Across four studies participants (N = 818) rated the profoundness of abstract art images accompanied with varying categories of titles, including: pseudo-profound bullshit titles (e.g., The Deaf Echo), mundane titles (e....