Chris Starmer

University of Nottingham | Notts · School of Economics

We introduce “group cohesion” to study the economic relevance of social relationships in team production. We operationalize measurement of group cohesion, adapting the “oneness scale” from psychology. A series of experiments, including a pre-registered replication, reveals strong positive associations between group cohesion and performance assessed...

The Description-Experience gap (DE gap) is widely thought of as a tendency for people to act as if overweighting rare events when information about those events is derived from descriptions but as if underweighting rare events when they experience them through a sampling process. While there is now clear evidence that some form of DE gap exists, it...

Experimental research has shown that ordinary people often perform remarkably well in solving coordination games that involve no conflicts of interest. While most experiments in the past studied such coordination games among socially distant anonymous players, here we study behaviour in a set of two player coordination games and compare the outcome...

We investigate whether uninformative relative performance feedback can create biases in confidence leading it to ‘snowball’. We study elicited confidence about own performance, relative to other group members, in three stages. As subjects move across stages, we change group composition so that new groups contain either only top performers or only b...

Humans frequently cooperate for collective benefit, even in one-shot social dilemmas. This provides a challenge for theories of cooperation. Two views focus on intuitions but offer conflicting explanations. The Social Heuristics Hypothesis argues that people with selfish preferences rely on cooperative intuitions and predicts that deliberation redu...

Priming is an established tool in psychology for investigating aspects of cognitive processes underlying decision making and is increasingly applied in economics. We report a systematic attempt to test the reproducibility and generalisability of priming effects on risk attitudes in a more diverse population than professionals and students, when pri...

Human groups can often maintain high levels of cooperation despite the threat of exploitation by individuals who reap the benefits of cooperation without contributing to its costs1–4. Prominent theoretical models suggest that cooperation is particularly likely to thrive if people join forces to curb free riding and punish their non-contributing pee...

We report two studies investigating whether, and if so how, different low-cost interventions affect voter registration rates. Low-cost message-based interventions are increasingly used to promote target behaviours. While growing evidence shows that such ‘nudges’ often significantly impact behaviour, understanding of why interventions work or fail i...

This book presents the definitive exposition of ‘prospect theory’, a compelling alternative to the classical utility theory of choice. Building on the 1982 volume, Judgement Under Uncertainty, this book brings together seminal papers on prospect theory from economists, decision theorists, and psychologists, including the work of the late Amos Tvers...

In a paper published in Management Science in 2015, Stewart, Reimers, and Harris (SRH) demonstrated that shapes of utility and probability weighting functions could be manipulated by adjusting the distributions of outcomes and probabilities on offer as predicted by the theory of decision by sampling. So marked were these effects that, at face value...

Understanding human cooperation is a major scientific challenge. While cooperation is typically explained with reference to individual preferences, a recent cognitive process view hypothesized that cooperation is regulated by socially acquired heuristics. Evidence for the social heuristics hypothesis rests on experiments showing that time-pressure...

We report experiments investigating how experience influences the endowment effect. Our experiments feature endowments which are bundles of unfamiliar consumption goods. We examine how a subject’s willingness to swap items from their endowment is influenced by prior experiences of tasting the goods in question and by prior experiences of choosing b...

We examine the relationship between confidence in own absolute performance and risk attitudes using two confidence elicitation procedures: self-reported (non-incentivised) confidence and an incentivised procedure that elicits the certainty equivalent of a bet based on performance. The former procedure reproduces the “hard-easy effect” (underconfide...

Understanding the nature and influence of social relationships is of increasing interest to behavioral economists, and behavioral scientists more generally. In turn, this creates a need for tractable, and reliable, tools for measuring fundamental aspects of social relationships. We provide a comprehensive evaluation of the 'Inclusion of the Other i...

Recent research invokes preference imprecision to explain violations of individual decision theory. While these inquiries are suggestive, the nature and significance of such imprecision remain poorly understood. We explore three questions using a new measurement tool in an experimental investigation of imprecision in lottery valuations: Does such p...

Objectives: The natural frequency effect (NF effect)-whereby framing health risks using information presented as natural frequencies (NFs), instead of conditional probabilities (CPs), results in improved diagnostic problem solving-has led to the recommended use of NFs in clinical practice. This experiment tests, via incentivization of a lab-based...

Council of the UK as part of its Risk and Human Behaviour Programme (award number L MG1 25 2053). Robert Sugden’s work was also supported by the Leverhulme Trust. 1 This paper reports an exercise in a research methodology that we believe is new to experimental economics: adversarial collaboration. An adversarial collaboration is an investigation ca...

This paper reports an experiment designed to test whether prior consultation within a group affects subsequent individual decision making in tasks where demonstrability of correct solutions is low. In our experiment subjects considered two paintings created by two different artists and were asked to guess which artist made each painting. We observe...

The paper reports an experiment which tests the principle of separability, i.e. that behaviour in a dynamic choice problem is independent of history and of unreachable eventualities. Although this is a well-known principle of orthodox decision theory and central to conventional economic modelling, it has been questioned on grounds suggested by non-...

Preference reversal (PR) is a widely observed behavioural tendency for the preference ordering of a pair of alternatives to depend, in a predictable way, on the process used to elicit it.

This paper reports experimental tests of two alternative explanations of how players use focal points to select equilibria in one-shot coordination games. Cognitive hierarchy theory explains coordination as the result of common beliefs about players’ pre-reflective inclinations towards the relevant strategies; the theory of team reasoning explains...

Since the 1980s, there has been explosive growth in the use of experimental methods in economics, leading to exciting developments in economic theory and policy. Despite this, the status of experimental economics remains controversial. InExperimental Economics, the authors draw on their experience and expertise in experimental economics, economic t...

Introduction In this chapter my aim is to offer some reflection upon Friedman's methodology, focusing in particular upon his work relating to the theory of risky choice. With this objective in mind, I revisit two key papers in which Friedman and Savage (1948, 1952) discuss the empirical support for expected-utility theory (EUT). In these papers the...

We report two experiments which investigate whether experience of decision making in repeated markets purges behaviour of preference reversals. We investigate two behavioural mechanisms that may be shaping bids in repeated auctions: A tendency to adjust bids towards previously observed market prices, and a tendency to reduce bids following bad mark...

La colección Actualidad forma parte del catálogo de publicaciones científicas de la fundación y está destinada tanto al lector especializado como a la opinión pública en general. Cada una de sus ediciones se estructura como informes monográficos para el fomento de la reflexión y el análisis sobre aspectos de relevancia para la sociedad andaluza del...

We present a new theory of decision under risk called third-generation prospect theory. A novel feature of our version of prospect theory is that, by allowing reference points to be uncertain, it is able to accommodate the phenomenon of preference reversal. While several previous theories of preference reversal have been proposed, thus far it has r...

Previous studies suggest that two otherwise robust ‘anomalies’ – preference reversals and disparities between buying and selling valuations – are eroded when respondents participate in repeated markets. We report an experiment which investigates whether this is true when factors neglected in previous studies are controlled, and which distinguishes...

Prior studies have observed that, in separate evaluation, the attractiveness of playing a simple gamble (7/36 to win $9; otherwise win nothing) is greatly enhanced by introducing a small loss (7/36 win $9; otherwise lose 5¢). The present studies tested and confirmed an explanation of this finding based on the concept of evaluability and the affect...

An extensive literature demonstrates the existence of framing effects in the laboratory and in questionnaire studies. This paper reports new evidence from a natural field experiment using a subject pool one may consider as particularly resistant to such effects: experimental economists. We find that while the behaviour of junior experimental econom...

This paper reports experimental tests of two alternative explanations of how players use focal points to select equilibria in one-shot coordination games. Cognitive hierarchy theory explains coordination as the result of common beliefs about players’ pre-reflective inclinations towards the relevant strategies; the theory of team reasoning explains...

We undertake a series of tests examining the extent to which the affect heuristic (Slovic et al., 2002) is or is not triggered by changes in the framing and hence context of assessments of hypothetical gamble tasks using a rating scale response mode. Our initial investigations examine the replicability of findings using the same parameters used by...

In recent years there has been increasing interest in using the related concepts of affect and evaluability to understand a wide range of decision behaviours. However, a common feature of studies to date is that they have adopted hypothetical payoff designs. Such an approach is open to criticisms of non-consequentiality. In this paper we address th...

Since the 1980s, there has been explosive growth in the use of experimental methods in economics, leading to exciting developments in economic theory and policy. Despite this, the status of experimental economics remains controversial. In Experimental Economics, the authors draw on their experience and expertise in experimental economics, economic...

There is wide-ranging evidence, much of it deriving from economics experiments, of ‘anomalies’ in behaviour that challenge standard preference theories. This paper explores the implications of these anomalies for preference elicitation methods. Because methods that are used to inform public policy, such as contingent valuation, are based on standar...

Developments in the theory of individual decision-making have been partly shaped by two criteria: a desire for models consistent with experimental evidence; and a pre-commitment to models built on normatively appealing axioms. This paper explores the compatibility of these two selection criteria. The paper reconstructs and scrutinises an argument d...

We report the results of an experimental test for feedback-conditional regret effects using a naturally occurring gamble. The properties of this gamble are likely to engage decision-makers to a greater extent than conventional abstract laboratory gambles, and be more generally exhibited by real world objects of choice. We argue that this conveys a...

This paper reports an ‘adversarial collaboration’—a project carried out by two individuals or research groups who, having proposed conflicting hypotheses, seek to resolve their dispute. It describes an experiment which investigates whether, when individuals consider giving up money in exchange for goods, they construe money outlays as losses or as...

We present a new experimental investigation of preference reversal. Although economists and psychologists have suggested a variety of accounts for this phenomenon, the existing data do not adequately discriminate between them. Relative to previous studies, our design offers enhanced control for economic explanations and new tests of psychological h...

The existence of part–whole bias has been hotly disputed in the recent contingent valuation literature. This paper reports on an experiment into part–whole bias. Employing vouchers for parts of a restaurant meal and using an incentive compatible procedure, valuations of the parts and of the whole were elicited. The sum of the valuations of the part...

There is some evidence that, as individuals participate in repeated markets, "anomalies" tend to disappear. One interpretation is that individuals — particularly marginal traders — are learning to act on underlying preferences which satisfy standard assumptions. An alternative interpretation, the "shaping" hypothesis, is that individuals" preferenc...

The discovered preference hypothesis appears to insulate expected utility theory (EU) from disconfirming experimental evidence. It asserts that individuals have coherent underlying preferences, which experiments may not reveal unless subjects have adequate opportunities and incentives to discover which actions best satisfy their preferences. We ide...

Using equivalent loss (the monetary loss equivalent to a proposed amenity reduction, EL) and equivalent gain (the gain equivalent to a proposed amenity increase, EG) alongside traditional welfare measures in a contingent valuation study of traffic disamenity, we report an experiment designed to test theoretical explanations of the well-known dispar...

This article reviews recent developments in the economic theory of individual decision making under risk. Since the 1950s it has been known that individual choices violate the standard model of expected utility in predictable ways. Considerable research effort has now been devoted to the project of developing a superior descriptive model. Following...

This paper tests a novel implication of the original version of prospect theory (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979): that choices may systematically violate transitivity. Some have interpreted this implication as a weakness, viewing it as an anomaly generated by the editing phase of prospect theory which can be rendered redundant by an appropriate re-spec...

Is the rapid growth of experimental research in economics evidence of a new scientific spirit at work or merely fresh evidence of a misplaced desire to ape the methods of natural sciences? It is often argued that economic experiments are artificial in some sense that tends to render the results problematic or uninteresting. In the early part of thi...

I take it that in raising the question "What have we learned from experimental economics" under the broader umbrella of "controversy" the point is not to solicit a catalogue of experimental findings, but rather to signal the more pointed question: are we learning anything at all, or at least much that is very useful form experimentation in economic...

The common ratio effect is a well-attested violation of expected utility theory. This paper uses four principles of dynamic choice to characterize alternative theoretical strategies for explaining the effect. It reports an experiment which tests these principles and, by implication, several well-known accounts of the common ratio effect. Unlike pre...

In two previously reported experiments, Graham Loomes, Chris Starmer, and Robert Sugden have found that choices are systematically nontransitive, following a pattern of 'cycling asymmetry' predicted by regret theory. However, there are other potential explanations for these observations. This paper reports four experiments designed to discriminate...

The random lottery incentive system is widely used in experimental economics to motivate subjects. This paper investigates its validity. It reports three experiments which compare responses given to decision tasks which are embedded in random lottery designs with responses in 'single choice' designs in which each subject faces just one task for rea...

Is the rapid growth of experimental research in economics evidence of a new scientific spirit at work or merely fresh evidence of a misplaced desire to ape the methods of natural sciences? It is often argued that economic experiments are artificial in some sense which tends to render the results problematic or uninteresting. In the early part of th...

The predominant view amongst experimental economists is that deception should, as far as possible, be avoided in economics experiments. This paper was written in response to an article which challenges that conventional view and suggests that there are positive reasons for using deception and "little evidence to support the argument that deception...

Eight alternative methods of eliciting preferences between money and a consumption good are identified: two of these are standard willingness-to-accept and willingness-to-pay measures. These methods differ with respect to the reference point used and the dimension in which responses are expressed. The loss aversion hypothesis of Tversky and Kahnema...

Economic theories of choice under uncertainty assume that agents act as if they have preferences which govern their choices between risky options. Theories differ as to the exact specification of the preference structure, but it is common to assume that preferences are complete and satisfy certain consistency requirements such as transitivity and m...

This paper reports an experimental investigation of the hypothesis that in coordination games, players draw on shared concepts of salience to identify focal points on which they can coordinate. The experiment involves games in which equilibria can be distinguished from one another only in terms of the way strategies are labelled. The games are desi...

Experimental testing of theories of choice under uncertainty has revealed a range of phenomena which, as yet, no single theory can accommodate. This article attempts to trace the apparent difficulty in developing a general descriptive model to a common misperception about the nature of choice under uncertainty: that individuals act as if guided by...

Regret theory predicts that choices over prospects will be systematically influenced by the juxtaposition of outcomes in the payoff matrix. Experiments have found apparent juxtaposition effects of this kind. However, these experiments have not controlled for "event-splitting effects" (ESEs), by which the subjective weight given to an outcome depend...

In this paper, the authors demonstrate that the assumption of "regret aversion," which has been invoked in regret theory to explain several well-documented violations of expected utility theory, also implies the existence of strict preferences between some stochastically equivalent actions and implies certain systematic violations of monotonicity....

A generalised common consequence problem is used to contrast the predictions of expected utility theory and several new theories of choice under uncertainty. An experiment designed to test these predictions is reported. Systematic violations of expected utility theory are detected but although a consistent pattern emerges from the data, it offers l...

This paper reports an experimental investigation of the hypothesis that convention constitutes a form of common knowledge which people utilise in bargaining games with multiple equilibria. We find that in simple games in which players are rewarded for coordinating their strategies but are not allowed to communicate, people are able to achieve coord...

The preference reversal phenomenon is usually interpreted as evidence of nontransitivity of preference, but has also been explained as the result of the difference between individuals' responses to choice and valuation problems; the devices used by experimenters to elicit valuations; and the "random lottery selection" incentive system. This paper r...

Preference reversal is often explained as an information-processing effect, whereby individuals respond differently to valuation problems than to straight choices. Regret theory offers the alternative explanation that individuals act on consistent, but nontransitive, preferences. Regret theory, in its most general form, is shown to make specific pr...

Several theories explain the common ratio effect as probability effect resulting from properties of individuals' preference ordering over probability distributions of consequences. In contrast, regret theory explains it as the result of changes in the juxtaposition of consequences in the action/state matrix. This article reports an experiment that...

Without Abstract

There is some evidence that, as individuals participate in repeated markets, 'anomalies' tend to disappear. One interpretation is that individuals - particularly marginal traders - are learning to act on underlying preferences which satisfy standard assumptions. An alternative inter- pretation, the 'shaping' hypothesis, is that individuals' prefere...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of East Anglia, 1992.