Revealed strength of preference: Inference from response times
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2019, Vol 14, Issue 4
Abstract
Revealed preference is the dominant approach for inferring preferences, but it is limited in that it relies solely on discrete choice data. When a person chooses one alternative over another, we cannot infer the strength of their preference or predict how likely they will be to make the same choice again. However, the choice process also produces response times (RTs), which are continuous and easily observable. It has been shown that RTs often decrease with strength-of-preference. This is a basic property of sequential sampling models such as the drift diffusion model. What remains unclear is whether this relationship is sufficiently strong, relative to the other factors that affect RTs, to allow us to reliably infer strength-of-preference across individuals. Using several experiments, we show that even when every subject chooses the same alternative, we can still rank them based on their RTs and predict their behavior on other choice problems. We can also use RTs to predict whether a subject will repeat or reverse their decision when presented with the same choice problem a second time. Finally, as a proof-of-concept, we demonstrate that it is also possible to recover individual preference parameters from RTs alone. These results demonstrate that it is indeed possible to use RTs to infer preferences.
Authors and Affiliations
Arkady Konovalov and Ian Krajbich
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP678425
- DOI -
- Views 149
- Downloads 0
Success-slope effects on the illusion of control and on remembered success-frequency
The illusion of control refers to the inference of action-outcome contingency in situations where outcomes are in fact random. The strength of this illusion has been found to be affected by whether the frequency of succe...
Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow: Individual differences in future self-continuity account for saving
Some people find it more difficult to delay rewards than others. In three experiments, we tested a “future self-continuity” hypothesis that individual differences in the perception of one’s present self as continuous wit...
Cultural differences in risk: The group facilitation effect
We compared South Koreans with Australians in order to characterize cultural differences in attitudes and choices regarding risk, at both the individual and group levels. Our results showed that Australians, when assesse...
Measuring Risk Literacy: The Berlin Numeracy Test
We introduce the Berlin Numeracy Test, a new psychometrically sound instrument that quickly assesses statistical numeracy and risk literacy. We present 21 studies (n=5336) showing robust psychometric discriminability acr...
Observing others’ behavior and risk taking in decisions from experience
This paper examines how observing other people’s behavior affects risk taking in repeated decision tasks. In Study 1, 100 participants performed experience-based decision tasks either alone or in pairs, with the two memb...