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The Effect of Expected Value on Attraction Effect Preference Reversals
The attraction effect shows that adding a third alternative to a choice set can alter preference between the original two options. For over 30 years, this simple demonstration of context dependence has been taken as strong evidence against a class of parsimonious value‐maximising models that evaluat...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
John Wiley and Sons Inc.
2016
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5637901/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29081595 http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/bdm.2001 |
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author | Farmer, George D. Warren, Paul A. El‐Deredy, Wael Howes, Andrew |
author_facet | Farmer, George D. Warren, Paul A. El‐Deredy, Wael Howes, Andrew |
author_sort | Farmer, George D. |
collection | PubMed |
description | The attraction effect shows that adding a third alternative to a choice set can alter preference between the original two options. For over 30 years, this simple demonstration of context dependence has been taken as strong evidence against a class of parsimonious value‐maximising models that evaluate alternatives independently from one another. Significantly, however, in previous demonstrations of the attraction effect alternatives are approximately equally valuable, so there was little consequence to the decision maker irrespective of which alternative was selected. Here we vary the difference in expected value between alternatives and provide the first demonstration that, although extinguished with large differences, this theoretically important effect persists when choice between alternatives has a consequence. We use this result to clarify the implications of the attraction effect, arguing that although it robustly violates the assumptions of value‐maximising models, it does not eliminate the possibility that human decision making is optimal. © 2016 The Authors Journal of Behavioral Decision Making Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5637901 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2016 |
publisher | John Wiley and Sons Inc. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-56379012017-10-25 The Effect of Expected Value on Attraction Effect Preference Reversals Farmer, George D. Warren, Paul A. El‐Deredy, Wael Howes, Andrew J Behav Decis Mak Research Articles The attraction effect shows that adding a third alternative to a choice set can alter preference between the original two options. For over 30 years, this simple demonstration of context dependence has been taken as strong evidence against a class of parsimonious value‐maximising models that evaluate alternatives independently from one another. Significantly, however, in previous demonstrations of the attraction effect alternatives are approximately equally valuable, so there was little consequence to the decision maker irrespective of which alternative was selected. Here we vary the difference in expected value between alternatives and provide the first demonstration that, although extinguished with large differences, this theoretically important effect persists when choice between alternatives has a consequence. We use this result to clarify the implications of the attraction effect, arguing that although it robustly violates the assumptions of value‐maximising models, it does not eliminate the possibility that human decision making is optimal. © 2016 The Authors Journal of Behavioral Decision Making Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. John Wiley and Sons Inc. 2016-12-19 2017-10 /pmc/articles/PMC5637901/ /pubmed/29081595 http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/bdm.2001 Text en © 2016 The Authors Journal of Behavioral Decision Making Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
spellingShingle | Research Articles Farmer, George D. Warren, Paul A. El‐Deredy, Wael Howes, Andrew The Effect of Expected Value on Attraction Effect Preference Reversals |
title | The Effect of Expected Value on Attraction Effect Preference Reversals |
title_full | The Effect of Expected Value on Attraction Effect Preference Reversals |
title_fullStr | The Effect of Expected Value on Attraction Effect Preference Reversals |
title_full_unstemmed | The Effect of Expected Value on Attraction Effect Preference Reversals |
title_short | The Effect of Expected Value on Attraction Effect Preference Reversals |
title_sort | effect of expected value on attraction effect preference reversals |
topic | Research Articles |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5637901/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29081595 http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/bdm.2001 |
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