No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Decision Making in the Short Run
Abstract
Examines the commonly accepted idea that the only rational measure of the worth of a gamble is its expected value or some subjective counterpart such as expected utility. The argument is made that for short-run situations, it is reasonable to consider the probability of coming out ahead instead of, or in addition to, the long-run expectation. Changes are discussed that might be called for in theories of rational choice when the prescriptions of rational models violate common sense. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
... Samuelson [2] sketched out a proof that was later fleshed out more fully [4] pointed out that equating the multipleplay choice with a series of single-play choices is not a valid assumption, and he demonstrated how EU theory can be consistent with the choice pattern of Samuelson's colleague under the conditions outlined in the proofs when consideration of the aggregate is based on current one's wealth state rather than wealth states at each sequential choice point. Lopes [5,6] has also argued for the rationality of this behavior on the basis of considerations outside of the realm of EU theory. Thus, there is still a good deal of controversy concerning the normative status of switching choices between single plays of a risky prospect and multiple or repeated plays of that prospect. ...
... There are several distinctions that are immediately apparent when comparing a single play to multiple plays. As pointed out by Lopes [5,6], the EV of $50 for Samuelson's bet does not correspond to any realized outcome in the single-play situation-one walks away either $100 poorer or $200 richer. In contrast, the EV is the modal value of the distribution for the 10-play situation (in this case, there is a probability of 0.2461 of walking away with the EV). ...
... Other theoretical explanations focus on more distinct process differences between the situations, emphasizing shifting from qualitative to quantitative processing, a focus on aspiration levels, or on higher order features of distribution of outcomes related to variability, skewing, and rank [5-7,22,]. Lopes [5,6] pointed out that EU theory's emphasis on one moment of the outcome distribution, the mean, may not lead to the wisest decisions. Other moments related to variability and skewing may be important, especially when some outcomes are catastrophic. ...
Choices and evaluations of risky prospects often violate norms of expected utility theory and the underlying normative principles of rational decision-making. However, when risky prospects are represented as being repeatedly instantiated, choices and evaluations often change to conform more closely to the long-run perspective reflected in normative models. Differences between responses for single and repeated gambles have been analyzed normatively, explored empirically, and evaluated theoretically. Normative analyses have argued both for and against changing behavior for single and repeated gambles. Empirically, shifts in behavior for single and repeated risky prospects are found to be common, stronger when outcomes are perceived as fungible, and stronger when the repeated outcome distribution is displayed. Furthermore, these shifts have been found to occur in both laboratory and real-world settings and have been considered a possible moderator of violations of expected utility theory. A variety of theoretical explanations are posited to explain this behavior, including those that emphasize consequences of loss aversion as well as those that implicate alternative bases for evaluating single and repeated cases.
Keywords:
EU theory;
expected value;
binomial distribution;
Samuelson's bet;
normative analyses;
repeated gambles;
loss aversion
... We are not the first authors to critique the use of utility theory as a standard of decision making (e.g., see Hastie, 1991;Lopes, 1981). However, our approach differs from other critiques of utility theory in two important ways. ...
... Several researchers have questioned whether conformity to the axioms of utility theory is a necessary component of good decision making. For example, some researchers, such as Lopes (1981), have objected to the particular rule of maximizing expected utility. Lopes argued that a normative model should not require maximization but should acknowledge the fact that people have other legitimate goals in decisions (e.g., security). ...
Much research in psychology has evaluated the quality of people's decisions by comparisons with subjective expected utility (SEU) theory. This article suggests that typical arguments made for the status of utility theory as normative do not justify its use by psychologists as a standard by which to evaluate decision quality. It is argued that to evaluate decision quality, researchers need to identify those decision processes that tend to lead to desirable outcomes. It is contended that a good decision-making process must be concerned with how (and whether) decision makers evaluate potential consequences of decisions, the extent to which they accurately identify all relevant consequences, and the way in which they make final choices. Research that bears on these issues is reviewed.
... The principle of maximizing expected utility can be justified on the grounds that its consistent application will guarantee that the decision maker obtains the maximum utility "in the long run" (after an infinite number of independent repetitions), but this justification is not to everyone's liking (e.g., Lopes, 1981;Samuelson, 1963). Indeed, it was not until Von Neumann and Morgenstern (1947), in the second edition of their famous book "Theory of games and economic behavior", proved that maximizing expected utility uniquely satisfies a set of reasonable a priori axioms that EUT became the cornerstone of rational decision making. ...
... As people gain more experience with types of decision problems, they should learn to make more optimal decisions. Even the expectation that a gamble will be played repeatedly can increase the tendency to choose reward maximizing alternatives (Lopes, 1981;Wedell & Böckeholt, 1990). According to Friedman (1998, p. 941) 'every choice "anomaly" can be greatly diminished or entirely eliminated in appropriately structured learning environments' and evidence discussed in this section suggests that this may indeed be the case. ...
This chapter reviews normative and descriptive aspects of decision making. Expected Utility Theory (EUT), the dominant normative theory of decision making, is often thought to provide a relatively poor description of how people actually make decisions. Prospect Theory has been proposed as a more descriptively valid alternative. The failure of EUT seems at least partly due to the fact that people’s preferences are often unstable and subject to various influences from the method of elicitation, decision context, and goals. In novel situations, people need to infer their preferences from various cues such as the context and their memories and emotions. Through repeated experience with particular decisions and their outcomes, these inferences can become more stable, resulting in behavior that is more consistent with EUT.
... Psychologists who study decision making under conditions of risk or uncertainty will often refer to the decision frame (Tversky & Kahneman, 1981;Lopes, 1981;Payne, Bettmen, & Johnson, 1992;Schneider, 1992) or the appropriate problem space (Keren, 1984;Newell & Simon, 1972) for the decision. The frame or problem space is another name for the means-ends framework recalled or created for the specific decision episode. ...
... Psychologists have built a strong empirical case over the past 40 years demonstrating that the average market actor does not always engage in the extensive and intensive cognitive calculations once presumed to be associated with allocative reasoning (Abelson & Levi, 1985;Lopes, 1981;Payne, Bettman, & Johnson, 1991;Slovic, Fischhoff, & Lichenstein, 1977). Limitations in cognitive capacity and information processing leads actors to frequently ignore information or restrict information searches to immediately available, if unreliable, sources or to employ a variety of heuristics in order to simplify the allocative task. ...
... Psychologists who study decision making under conditions of risk or uncertainty will often refer to the decision frame (Tversky & Kahneman, 1981;Lopes, 1981;Payne, Bettmen, & Johnson, 1992;Schneider, 1992) or the appropriate problem space (Keren, 1984;Newell & Simon, 1972) for the decision. The frame or problem space is another name for the means-ends framework recalled or created for the specific decision episode. ...
... Psychologists have built a strong empirical case over the past 40 years demonstrating that the average market actor does not always engage in the extensive and intensive cognitive calculations once presumed to be associated with allocative reasoning (Abelson & Levi, 1985;Lopes, 1981;Payne, Bettman, & Johnson, 1991;Slovic, Fischhoff, & Lichenstein, 1977). Limitations in cognitive capacity and information processing leads actors to frequently ignore information or restrict information searches to immediately available, if unreliable, sources or to employ a variety of heuristics in order to simplify the allocative task. ...
... Unusually for BBS, in the same commentary section, Kahneman and Tversky were allowed to respond to Levi's comment; as an editorial note explains, they had asked the editor to see Levi's comment at the proof stage, meaning that Levi could not respond in return. Lopes (1981) argued that, contrary to the dictum of expected utility theory, decision-making in the short run is not the same as in the long run. For instance, people might hesitate to accept a bet of winning $2,000 or losing $1,000 on the toss of a fair coin, but accept the same bet if it is repeated 100 times. ...
During the Cold War, logical rationality – consistency axioms, subjective expected utility maximization, Bayesian probability updating – became the bedrock of economics and other social sciences. In the 1970s, logical rationality underwent attack by the heuristics-and-biases program, which interpreted the theory as a universal norm of how individuals should make decisions, although such an interpretation is absent in von Neumann and Morgenstern’s foundational work and dismissed by Savage. Deviations in people’s judgments from the theory were thought to reveal stable cognitive biases, which were in turn thought to underlie social problems, justifying governmental paternalism. In the 1990s, the ecological rationality program entered the field, based on the work of Simon. It moves beyond the narrow bounds of logical rationality and analyzes how individuals and institutions make decisions under uncertainty and intractability. This broader view has shown that many supposed cognitive biases are marks of intelligence rather than irrationality, and that heuristics are indispensable guides in a world of uncertainty. The passionate debate between the three research programs became known as the rationality wars. I provide a brief account from the ‘frontline’ and show how the parties understood in strikingly different ways what the war entailed.
... Auxiliary assumptions aside, there is the more general question of whether prospect theory provides a valid account of human choices, and therefore of the differences observed across conditions. Fortunately, the status of our main results does not depend on the validity of prospect theory; They will hold even if the results are to be explained in terms of a change in attention exchange (e.g., Birnbaum, 2008), outcome-ratio evaluations (e.g., De Langhe & Puntoni, 2015), or a shift in risk preferences that is not based on utility functions (e.g., Coombs & Pruitt, 1960;Lopes, 1981). For example, according to the risk-as-variance perspective of expected-utility theory, people's choices in mean-preserving pairs reflect their general risk attitudes rather than their loss aversion. ...
Individuals’ decisions under risk tend to be in line with the notion that “losses loom larger than gains.” This loss aversion in decision making is commonly understood as a stable individual preference that is manifested across different contexts. The presumed stability and generality, which underlies the prominence of loss aversion in the literature at large, has been recently questioned by studies reporting how loss aversion can disappear, and even reverse, as a function of the choice context. The present study investigated whether loss aversion reflects a trait-like attitude of avoiding losses or rather individuals’ adaptability to different contexts. We report three experiments investigating the within-subject context sensitivity of loss aversion in a two-alternative forced-choice task. Our results show that the choice context can shift people’s loss aversion, though somewhat inconsistently. Moreover, individual estimates of loss aversion are shown to have a considerable degree of stability. Altogether, these results indicate that even though the absolute value of loss aversion can be affected by external factors such as the choice context, estimates of people’s loss aversion still capture the relative dispositions toward gains and losses across individuals.
... discussed byLopes 1981Lopes , 1996 are not naturally described as attitudes to outcomes. Nevertheless, we might think that these attitudes represent non-instrumental subjective valuations: Such agents may care about gambles not merely as means to getting good outcomes, but rather see some features of gambles as ends in themselves. ...
Behavioural welfare economics usually aims at mere means paternalism, helping agents better pursue their own goals. This paper discusses one initially promising way to inform policies addressed at agents who violate expected utility theory (EUT), namely what I call ‘CPT debiasing’. I argue that this approach is problematic even if we grant the normative authority of EUT, the descriptive adequacy of CPT (cumulative prospect theory), and the general acceptability of means paternalism. First, it is doubtful whether the CPT utility function measures what its proponents intend. Second, by imposing risk neutrality on agents the approach involves a more problematic paternalism.
... Thus, people may evaluate outcomes differently in the short versus long run, even if the lottery remains the same (cf. Lopes, 1981;Tversky & Bar-Hillel, 1983). Subsequent studies have confirmed that people prefer multiple over single bets, and focus more on specific attributes (Wedell, 2011) and less information (Wulff et al., 2015) in single-bet than multi-bet conditions. ...
Objectives This research addresses how younger and older adults' decisions and evaluations of gains and losses are affected by the way in which monetary incentives are provided. We compared two common incentive schemes in decision making: pay one (only a single decision is incentivized) and pay all (incentives across all decisions are accumulated). Method Younger adults (18-36 years; n = 147) and older adults (60-89 years; n = 139) participated in either a pay-one or pay-all condition and made binary choices between two-outcome monetary lotteries in gain, loss, and mixed domains. We analyzed participants' decision quality, risk taking, and psychometric tests scores. Computational modeling of cumulative prospect theory served to measure sensitivity to outcomes and probabilities, loss aversion, and choice sensitivity. Results Decision quality and risk aversion were higher in the gain than mixed or loss domain, but unaffected by age. Loss aversion was higher and choice sensitivity was lower in older than younger adults. In the pay-one condition, the value functions were more strongly curved and choice sensitivity was higher than in the pay-all condition. Discussion An opportunity of accumulating incentives has similar portfolio effects on younger and older adults' decisions. In general, people appear to decide less cautiously in pay-all than pay-one scenarios. The impact of different incentive schemes should be carefully considered in aging and decision research.
... The purpose of decision theory under risk is precisely to provide tools to evaluate and compare lottery playing behaviours under different risk scenarios (Jeantet & Spanjaard, 2008). A better choice is then modelled as the gamble yielding the greater expected value (Lopes, 1981). Since Bernoulli (1738), however, it has become commonplace to acknowledge that individuals do not obey the expected value principle from a single-play prospect, but lottery companies do from a multiple-play prospect. ...
A surprisingly large number of lottery prizes go unclaimed every year. This leads us to suspect that what people bet on is not only money, but also good mood. We conducted three studies to explain, from an emotional perspective, why people play lottery games. We first conducted two survey studies to assess mood state reported by online (Study 1a) and offline lottery buyers (Study 1b) at different stages of lottery play. The results revealed that participants' highest mood appeared before knowing whether they had won. In Study 2, we manipulated the means of reward (lottery tickets vs. cash) and compared participants' mood changes at different stages of a rewards game in the laboratory. We found the following: first, lottery group participants were generally in a better mood; second, 42% of lottery group participants did not come to the laboratory to collect scratch cards; and third, lottery group participants took more time to return to the laboratory to check their tickets than participants in the cash group. In Study 3, we examined whether priming good or bad mood could influence participants' preferences for cash versus lottery tickets. The results revealed that participants who were primed for poor mood had a higher preference for lottery tickets compared with their good mood counterparts. These findings suggest that what our participants sought in lottery play was not only money, but improved mood.
... The costs, however, of continuing without an OTA or similar institution may very well outweigh the short-run costs. We do not, however, understand individuals to often think in terms of the long-run, as individuals often place an irrational value on the short-run (Lopes 1981). While retaining the status quo is the most probable, and easiest choice for legislators to make; the consequences of doing so seem to greatly outweigh the short-run costs. ...
This is the completed draft of my capstone paper for POSC 492 - Senior Seminar in Political Science at James Madison University. This draft was written throughout the Spring Semester as a reflection of what I have learned as an undergraduate student at James Madison University. This paper includes a review of the literature and a policy brief; both of which will be submitted to the James Madison Undergraduate Research Journal (JMURJ) and potentially other academic journals following revisions.
... Most models assume a risk-neutral discounter, that is, they are maximising expected quantity (or rate) of reward gain. This may be sufficient under repeated choices (where, after hundreds of repeated gambles, the reward rate approaches the long run expected reward rate), but makes little sense in a one-off, all-or-nothing decision (Lopes, 1981), where the reward is either obtained or not. Since acquiring the reward at the end of the wait time is an all-or-nothing outcome, risk sensitivity is a consideration. ...
Spatial discounting is a largely underexplored area of decision-making research, both theoretically and empirically, especially when compared to intertemporal choice, which has received significant attention in psychology and animal behaviour. Spatial decision problems seem to share some of the same features of a temporal decision problem (namely, the risk of reward objects disappearing and the opportunity cost of waiting), but there are several additional factors that affect the appropriate discount function for distant rewards. These include more significant opportunity costs, changes in the distances to all the other available opportunities, the post-reward costs of getting back home, the complex energetics associated with locomotion and all the additional risks faced by travelling itself. This paper organises and explores these factors and suggests some normative models that should predict the adaptive behaviour of animals and humans.
... Rather, it is likely that other factors not included in the recency-based account, such as risk preferences or goals (see, e.g., Hertwig et al., 2019), also play a role. For example, the differences between emmetropic and myopic individuals can also be construed as the pursuit of shortversus long-term goals (see Wulff et al., 2015;Lopes, 1981) or as maximization versus probability matching strategies (Gaissmaier & Schooler, 2008;van den Bos et al., 2009). Moreover, there exist at least two behavioral phenomena that are difficult to reconcile with the assumptions of the delta-rule model or other reinforcement-learning accounts for that matter. ...
Governments use taxes
to discourage undesired behaviors and encourage desired ones. One target of
such interventions is reckless behavior, such as texting while driving, which
in most cases is harmless but sometimes leads to catastrophic outcomes. Past
research has demonstrated how interventions can backfire when the tax on one
reckless behavior is set too high whereas other less attractive reckless
actions remain untaxed. In the context of experience-based decisions, this
undesirable outcome arises from people behaving as if they underweighted rare
events, which according to a popular theoretical account can result from basing
decisions on a small, random sample of past experiences. Here, we reevaluate
the adverse effect of overtaxation using an alternative account focused on
recency. We show that a reinforcement-learning model that weights recently
observed outcomes more strongly than than those observed in the past can
provide an equally good account of people's behavior. Furthermore, we show that
there exist two groups of individuals who show qualitatively distinct patterns
of behavior in response to the experience of catastrophic outcomes. We conclude
that targeted interventions tailored for a small group of myopic individuals
who disregard catastrophic outcomes soon after they have been experienced can
be nearly as effective as an omnibus intervention based on taxation that
affects everyone.
... Rather, it is likely that other factors not included in the recency-based account, such as risk preferences or goals (see, e.g., Hertwig et al., 2019), also play a role. For example, the differences between hyperopic and myopic individuals can also be construed as the pursuit of short-versus long-run goals (see Lopes, 1981;Wulff et al., 2015) or as maximization versus probability matching strategies (Gaissmaier & Schooler, 2008;van den Bos, 2009). In any case, based on our findings and similar results of previous studies (Spektor et al., 2019;Spektor & Kellen, 2018), strong individual differences seem to be a robust phenomenon that should be studied in future research using larger, more diagnostic data sets. ...
Governments often use taxes to discourage undesired behaviors or encourage desired ones. One target of such interventions are reckless behaviors such as texting while driving, which in most cases are harmless but sometimes lead to catastrophic outcomes. Past research has demonstrated how interventions can backfire when taxes for specific options are set too high and other reckless behaviors remain untaxed. In the case of experience-based decisions, this undesirable outcome arises from people choosing as if they underweighted rare events. A popular explanation for this as-if underweighting lies in individuals basing their decisions on a small sample of past experiences. Here, we reevaluate the adverse effect of overtaxation using a different theoretical account. We show that a reinforcement-learning model that weights more recently observed outcomes stronger than past ones can provide an equally good account of individuals’ behavior. Furthermore, using this model, we show that individuals fall into two classes with qualitatively distinct patterns of behavior. We conclude that targeted interventions tailored at the one third of individuals who act myopically by disregarding catastrophic outcomes quickly after they have been experienced can be more effective than an omnibus intervention based on taxation.
... The diminishing marginal utility explanation has been discredited several times, mainly because it overpredicts bids (Lopes, 1981;Martin, 2017;Menger, 1934;Moritz, 1923;Samuelson, 1960Samuelson, , 1977. (This is not to say that people do not show diminishing marginal utility in their behavior, just that this factor is insufficient to explain the paradox.) ...
The St. Petersburg paradox is a centuries‐old philosophical puzzle concerning a lottery with infinite expected payoff for which people are only willing to pay a small amount to play. Despite many attempts and several proposals, no generally accepted resolution is yet at hand. In this work, we present the first resource‐rational, process‐level explanation of this paradox, demonstrating that it can be accounted for by a variant of normative expected utility valuation which acknowledges cognitive limitations. Specifically, we show that Nobandegani et al.'s (2018) metacognitively rational model, sample‐based expected utility (SbEU), can account for major experimental findings on this paradox. Crucially, our resolution is consistent with two empirically well‐supported assumptions: (a) People use only a few samples in probabilistic judgments and decision‐making, and (b) people tend to overestimate the probability of extreme events in their judgment. Our work seeks to understand the St. Petersburg gamble as a particularly risky gamble whose process‐level explanation is consistent with a broader process‐level model of human decision‐making under risk.
... So konnte er erklären, dass der erwartete Nutzen des St. Petersburg-Spieles trotz eines unendlich grossen Erwartungswertes nicht unendlich gross sein musste. Später wurde das Konzept, dass der Wert von zusätzlichem Geld mit dem bereits vorhandenen Reichtum abnahm, auch unter dem Begriff des abnehmenden Grenznutzens bekannt.Obwohl debattiert wurde, ob Bernoulli das St. Petersburg-Paradox damit gelöst hatte oder nicht (z.B.Lopes, 1981;Weirich, 1984), war dies der Beginn der Entwicklung vieler Theorien zum Entscheiden unter Unsicherheit. Die prominenteste unter ihnen war die "expected utility theory" von VonNeumann und Morgenstern (1947), welche der gesamten hier vorgestellten Gruppe von Theorien den Namen gab. ...
Die vorliegende Arbeit untersuchte riskante Entscheidungen und die ihnen zugrundeliegenden Informationsintegrationsprozesse bei Jugendlichen und Erwachsenen sowie den Einfluss verschiedener Verarbeitungsmodi ('heiss' emotional- motivational versus 'kalt' kognitiv-rational) auf diese Entscheidungen. In 4 Experimenten füllten 342 Jugendliche und Erwachsene (12 bis 57 Jahre) einen Motivfragebogen aus und spielten ein Computerkartenspiel, bei dem sie riskante Entscheidungen treffen und Informationen zu möglichen Gewinnen, Verlusten und deren Eintretenswahrscheinlichkeiten berücksichtigen mussten. Die Integrationsmuster auf der Gruppenebene folgten weitestgehend additiven Modellen, auf der Individualebene ergaben sich dagegen grosse individuelle Unterschiede in den verfolgten Strategien. Als weiteres Ergebnis zeigte sich die Bedeutung der Unterscheidung heisser und kalter Entscheidungsprozesse beim riskanten Entscheiden sehr deutlich: Nur in den heissen, nicht aber den kalten Bedingungen konnte bei den jüngeren Altersgruppen - insbesondere den männlichen Teilnehmern - eine erhöhte Risikobereitschaft beobachtet werden; diese ging ausserdem mit einer geringeren Komplexität in der Informationsintegration einher. Die Korrelationsmuster zwischen dem Kartenspielverhalten und dem Motivfragebogen belegten weiter die bedeutsame Rolle, die insbesondere heisse Formen der Informationsverarbeitung bei der Entstehung riskanten Verhaltens bei Jugendlichen und jungen Erwachsenen spielen. The thesis investigates risky decision making and risk taking as well as the underlying information integration processes from youth to adulthood. Further, it explores the influence of 'hot' emotional-motivational versus 'cold' cognitive-rational decision modes on risky decision making. In 4 experiments, 342 participants (12 to 57 years of age) completed a motivational questionnaire and played a computer card game in which they made risky decisions based on varying information regarding potential wins and losses and the probabilities of winning or losing. On the group level, information integration mainly followed additive patterns while, on the individual level, large individual differences in the strategies were found. The results highlighted the importance of differentiating hot and cold information processing in risky decision making: marked age and gender differences were found only in the hot but not in the cold conditions - with the younger males being most risk seeking and showing less complex patterns of information integration in the hot conditions. The observed correlations between strategies in the card game and measures of the motivational questionnaire further underscore the importance of considering hot modes of information processing to explain risk taking in adolescents and young adults.
... Critics of expected utility theory often point out that agents do seem to be sensitive to features of prospects-for instance in the ways I described in the last section. For instance, Lopes (1981Lopes ( , 1996 argues that next to certainty, mean, mode, variance, skewness and probability of loss are further 'global' features of gambles agents may care about. Buchak (2013) calls agents who are sensitive to values that are only achieved though a combination of outcomes across different states (other than expected utility itself) 'globally sensitive'. ...
This paper argues that instrumental rationality is more permissive than expected utility theory. The most compelling instrumentalist argument in favour of separability, its core requirement, is that agents with non-separable preferences end up badly off by their own lights in some dynamic choice problems. I argue that once we focus on the question of whether agents’ attitudes to uncertain prospects help define their ends in their own right, or instead only assign instrumental value in virtue of the outcomes they may lead to, we see that the argument must fail. Either attitudes to prospects assign non-instrumental value in their own right, in which case we cannot establish the irrationality of the dynamic choice behaviour of agents with non-separable preferences. Or they don’t, in which case agents with non-separable preferences can avoid the problematic choice behaviour without adopting separable preferences.
... There is often a gap between the final estimate and the actual value. Lopes argued that this is one of the possible sources of anchoring bias or anchoring effects [13]. In studies, the anchorage value has had a significant effect on the subsequent reaction. ...
Product configurators have been accepted as an important enabling toolkit to bridge customer needs and company offerings. In the configuration process, customers choose from a set of predefined attributes and their options. The combination of choices forms the desired product configuration. It is observed that some online configurators provide default options for each attribute. Although previous studies show that the default option significantly affects customers' choices during the product configuration process, it is not clear how other factors mediate this impact. In this paper, we investigate how product types, number of choices, customers' degree of expertise, the importance of the attributes and the configuring sequence affect consumers' decisions in the configuration process when default options are presented. Based on a series of empirical experiments, we find that customers' degree of expertise, the rating of the attribute importance, and the number of attribute choices have a significant effect on customers' choices for utilitarian products. For hedonic products, the importance of the attributes and the configuring sequence are significant factors.
... The study did not identify any instances of the decision biases studied by researchers such as Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky (1982). Christensen-Szalmslci (1980), Fraser, Smith, andSmith (1992), andLopes (1981) have argued that these biases have little relevance to naturalistic settings, so one possibility is that they would not crop up in a study such as this. Another possibility, raised by Cohen (personal communication) is that special procedures are needed to detect such biases; a field study would be incapable of demonstrating their occurrence. ...
... This task made decisions from description procedurally more comparable to decisions from experience. There is evidence, however, that choices in repeated decisions from description can differ from choices where only a single choice is made (Barron & Erev, 2003;Keren & Wagenaar, 1987;Lejarraga & Gonzalez, 2011;Lopes, 1981). To determine whether the first described choice was consistent with subsequent described choices, the data were re-analysed using only the first choices that participants made for the gain and loss description decisions. ...
People's risk preferences differ for choices based on described probabilities versus those based on information learned through experience. For decisions from description, people are typically more risk averse for gains than for losses. In contrast, for decisions from experience, people are sometimes more risk seeking for gains than losses, especially for choices with the possibility of extreme outcomes (big wins or big losses), which are systematically overweighed in memory. Using a within-subject design, this study evaluated whether this memory bias plays a role in the differences in risky choice between description and experience. As in previous studies, people were more risk seeking for losses than for gains in description but showed the opposite pattern in experience. People also more readily remembered the extreme outcomes and judged them as having occurred more frequently. These memory biases correlated with risk preferences in decisions from experience but not in decisions from description. These results suggest that systematic memory biases may be responsible for some of the differences in risk preference across description and experience.
... Our analysis is conditioned on the presence of a target for performance. The importance of targets, under names such as criterion values, aspiration levels, goals, or reference points, is widely recognized by researchers in the social and behavioral sciences (Markowitz 1952, Fishburn 1977, Heath et al. 1999, Kahneman and Tversky 1979, Lopes 1981, Simon 1955. Daniel Bernoulli (Bernoulli 1954, p. 25) used the concept of a target to qualify his assumption that utility was a nonlinear function of wealth, when he proposed that "a rich prisoner who possesses two thousand ducats but needs two thousand ducats more to repurchase his freedom will place a higher value on a gain of two thousand ducats than does another man who has less money than he." ...
Many decision makers seek to optimize choices between uncertain options such as strategies, employees, or products. When performance targets must be met, attending to observed past performance is not enough to optimize choices—option uncertainty must also be considered. For example, for stretch targets that exceed observed performance, more uncertain options are often better bets. A significant determinant of option uncertainty is sample size: for a given option, the smaller the sample of information we have about it, the greater the uncertainty. In two studies, choices were made between pairs of uncertain options with the goal of exceeding a specified performance target. Information about the options differed in the size of the sample drawn from them, sample size, and the observed performance of those samples, the proportion of successes or “hits” in the sample. We found people to be sensitive to sample size–based uncertainty only when differences in observed performance were negligible. We conclude that in the presence of performance targets, people largely fail to capitalize on the value advantages of small samples in the presence of stretch targets.
This paper was accepted by Yuval Rottenstreich, judgment and decision making.
... If so, their choice may be determined by the degree to which they undervalue delayed outcomes. Indeed, there is evidence that preference for a gamble presented singularly can differ dramatically from preference when the exact same gamble is presented repeatedly, allowing a long-run approach (Lopes, 1981). In a number of studies, drug-dependent subjects have performed poorly on the Gambling Task in comparison to matched controls (Bartzokis et al., 2000;Fishbein, 2000;Grant, Contoreggi & London, 2000;Mazas, Finn & Steinmetz, 2000). ...
... Sun et al.'s (2014) eye-tracking study reasoned that the expectation-maximization rule works better in the multiple-play condition (S. Li, 2003;DeKay et al., 2006;Lopes, 1981). If distinctly different eye-movement patterns are detected in the single-play condition and the multiple-play condition, then the risky choice in the single-play condition is unlikely to be ruled by the expectation-maximization rule. ...
In the field of eye tracking, scanpath analysis can reflect the sequential and temporal properties of the cognitive process. However, the advantages of scanpath analysis have not yet been utilized in the study of risky decision making. We explored the methodological applicability of scanpath analysis to test models of risky decision making by analyzing published data from the eye-tracking studies of Su et al. (2013); Wang and Li (2012), and Sun, Rao, Zhou, and Li (2014). These studies used a proportion task, an outcome-matched presentation condition, and a multiple-play condition as the baseline for comparison with information search and processing in the risky decision-making condition. We found that (i) the similarity scores of the intra-conditions were significantly higher than those of the inter-condition; (ii) the scanpaths of the two conditions were separable; and (iii) based on an inspection of typical trials, the patterns of the scanpaths differed between the two conditions. These findings suggest that scanpath analysis is reliable and valid for examining the process of risky decision making. In line with the findings of the three original studies, our results indicate that risky decision making is unlikely to be based on a weighting and summing process, as hypothesized by the family of expectation models. The findings highlight a new methodological direction for research on decision making. Copyright
... These claims have been criticized on a number of points. In particular, it has been argued that this research has (a) lacked generalizability and relevance for realworld decision making (Lopes, 1991); (b) imposed statistical norms without taking into account the content of the problem or situation (Einhorn & Hogarth, 1981;Gigerenzer, 1996;Lopes & Oden, 1991; see also Kahneman & Tversky, 1996); (c) presented heuristics that were too vague to count as explanations (Gigerenzer, 1996); (d) taken probability theory as a norm for single events (i.e., Bayesian), which would be considered misguided by many statisticians, who hold that probability theory concerns repeated events (Gigerenzer, 1994; see also Lopes, 1981); and (e) inappropriately used simple probability models as norms in situations calling for induction (Lopes, 1982). ...
Implicit learning involves the largely unconscious learning of dynamic statistical patterns and features, which leads to the development of tacit knowledge. This kind of learning is a ubiquitous, robust phenomenon that likely occurs in most, if not all, tasks in which individuals engage throughout their lives. In this paper, we argue that implicit learning and its end state, tacit knowledge, may assist in the acquisition, retention, and transfer of expertise and thus provide a form of tacit scaffolding for expertise development. The notion of tacit scaffolding represents a novel and interesting area of future research for the field of naturalistic decision making and naturalistic cognition.
... This result is inconsistent with previous explanations of the alleged bias by deeper cognitive deficiencies (e.g., confirmation biases) and has led to the theory of probabilistic mental models, which describes mechanisms that generate different confidence and frequency judgments (Gigerenzer et al., in press). Untutored intuition seems to be capable of making conceptual distinctions of the sort statisticians and philosophers make (e.g., Cohen, 1986;Lopes, 1981;Teigen, 1983). And it suggests that the important research questions to be investigated are How are different meanings of probability cued in everyday language? ...
The study of scientific discovery—where do new ideas come from?—has long been denigrated by philosophers as irrelevant to analyzing the growth of scientific knowledge. In particular, little is known about how cognitive theories are discovered, and neither the classical accounts of discovery as either probabilistic induction (e.g., H. Reichenbach, 1938) or lucky guesses (e.g., K. Popper, 1959), nor the stock anecdotes about sudden "eureka" moments deepen the insight into discovery. A heuristics approach is taken in this review, where heuristics are understood as strategies of discovery less general than a supposed unique logic discovery but more general than lucky guesses. This article deals with how scientists' tools shape theories of mind, in particular with how methods of statistical inference have turned into metaphors of mind. The tools-to-theories heuristic explains the emergence of a broad range of cognitive theories, from the cognitive revolution of the 1960s up to the present, and it can be used to detect both limitations and new lines of development in current cognitive theories that investigate the mind as an "intuitive statistician." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
... Premièrement, comme mentionné précédemment, il permet de traiter un éventail de choix plus important (ici, six types de paris) que celui utilisé dans les paradigmes « classiques » des études sur la décision dans ce domaine (limités, à notre connaissance, au choix entre deux types de paris seulement - Kahneman & Tversky, 1979;Von Neuman & Morgenstern, 1947). La passation répétée (ici, 21 fois) constitue son deuxième intérêt; en effet divers résultats expérimentaux supportent l'hypothèse selon laquelle les violations de la théorie de l'utilité attendue sont réduites lorsque le participant doit choisir entre différents paris, et ce plusieurs fois (Keren & Wagenaar, 1987;Lopes, 1981;Wedell & Böckenholt, 1990). La procédure retenue permet donc de prévenir cet effet de violation et s'avère plus « exigeante » au regard de notre hypothèse. ...
This study examined how being notified of another person's gains or losses influences participants' risk-taking and perception of skill in a game of French roulette. It is suggested that such a notification constitutes a reference point when coding the various options of a bet Results showed that being notified of another person's gains or losses increases risk-taking - riskier bets are chosen. This increase in risk-taking is in direct relation with the announced amount of gains or losses. Results related to perception of skill showed that participants notified of the losses of someone else attribute a greater role to skill in a game of French roulette. It is discussed how another's gains could serve as an aspiration level: Prestige would thus be an intermediate goal in monetary gambles, which would be, under some conditions, preferred to constant expected values.
... Our analysis is conditioned on the presence of a target for performance. The importance of targets, under names such as criterion values, aspiration levels, goals, or reference points, is widely recognized by researchers in the social and behavioral sciences (Markowitz 1952, Fishburn 1977, Heath et al. 1999, Kahneman and Tversky 1979, Lopes 1981, Simon 1955. Daniel Bernoulli (Bernoulli 1954, p. 25) used the concept of a target to qualify his assumption that utility was a nonlinear function of wealth, when he proposed that "a rich prisoner who possesses two thousand ducats but needs two thousand ducats more to repurchase his freedom will place a higher value on a gain of two thousand ducats than does another man who has less money than he." ...
... Whether people respond differently to gambles involving a single play versus repeated-play gambles may be related to the notion that multiple goals can underlie risky choice. People may pay attention to different goals depending on how often a gamble will be played (Lopes 1981) or whether the decision involves a single individual or a group of comparable individuals (Redelmeir & Tversky 1990) . Recent work provides substantial empirical support for the need to distinguish between risky-choice behavior for unique and repeated gambles (Keren & Wagenaar 1987;Joag et al 1990) . ...
... Some may argue that the addition of 'long-run' is redundant. Given the broad class of single-play decisions where expected utility does not immediately apply (Lopes, 1981), however, we would not agree. An offer to pay $5 to play once a gamble that pays off $100 with probability .1 and $0 otherwise will leave the gambler poorer by $5 nine times out of ten (Fig. 1). ...
To what extent do people adapt their information search policies and subsequent decisions to the long- and short-run consequences of choice environments? To address this question, we investigated exploration and exploitation policies in choice environments that involved single or multiple plays. We further compared behavior in these environments with behavior in the standard sampling paradigm. Frequently used in research on decision from experience, this paradigm does not explicitly implement the choice in terms of the short or long run. Results showed that people searched more in the multi-play environment than in the single-play environment. Moreover, the substantial search effort in the multi-play environment was conducive to choices consistent with expected value maximization, whereas the lesser search effort in the single-play environment was compatible with the goal of maximizing the chance of winning something. Furthermore, choice and search behaviors in the sampling paradigm predominantly echoed those observed in the single-play environment. This suggests that, when not instructed otherwise, participants in the sampling paradigm appear to favor search and choice strategies that embody short-run aspirations. Finally, the present findings challenge the revealed preference approach in decisions from experience, while also suggesting that information search may be an important and potentially even better signal of preference or aspirations than choice.
Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
... 12;Gigerenzer, 2001). Una intuición sin entrenar parece ser capaz de realizar el mismo tipo de distinciones conceptuales que los estadísticos y los filósofos hacen, así como la distinción entre los juicios de probabilidad subjetiva y los de frecuencia (p.ej., Cohen, 1986;Lopes, 1981;Teigen, 1983). Estos resultados sugieren que las preguntas importantes que deberían ser investigadas son ¿Cómo entran los diferentes significados de -probabilidad‖ en el lenguaje cotidiano? ...
... On average, repeating the gamble reduces the variance in the overall payoff the agents receive, and if games are played infinitely, then the payoffs will converge to the same mean. In this experiment, we do not consider situations where agents can change their behavior based on previous experiences 56 , but rather focus on unconditional responses. We observe that the agents no longer evolve a preference for risk sensitivity if the gamble is repeated several times in a lifetime (Figure 7). ...
Risk aversion is a common behavior universal to humans and animals alike. Economists have traditionally defined risk preferences by the curvature of the utility function. Psychologists and behavioral economists also make use of concepts such as loss aversion and probability weighting to model risk aversion. Neurophysiological evidence suggests that loss aversion has its origins in relatively ancient neural circuitries (e.g., ventral striatum). Could there thus be an evolutionary origin to risk aversion? We study this question by evolving strategies that adapt to play the equivalent mean payoff gamble. We hypothesize that risk aversion in this gamble is beneficial as an adaptation to living in small groups, and find that a preference for risk averse strategies only evolves in small populations of less than 1,000 individuals, or in populations segmented into groups of 150 individuals or fewer - numbers thought to be comparable to what humans encountered in the past. We observe that risk aversion only evolves when the gamble is a rare event that has a large impact on the individual's fitness. As such, we suggest that rare, high-risk, high-payoff events such as mating and mate competition could have driven the evolution of risk averse behavior in humans living in small groups.
Myopic Loss Aversion (MLA) is one of the study objects of behavioral economics. It corresponds to the fact that participants, when facing choice situations, cannot rationally evaluate the risks and profits of available options, leading them to choose investments more likely to occur but less profitable. This behavior shows that they cannot evaluate the options satisfactorily, so they have sub-optimal decisions. There may be conditions for MLA more favorable for it to occur, as the frequency one shows the participant the outcomes of their choices (feedback) and the probability of winning or losing. In this way, this study aims to evaluate how feedback influences participants' choices and the influence and interaction of the winning and losing probability. This study had the participation of 80 people, ages 18 to 30 years, all university students, 29 women and 51 men, without either relation to business degree courses or familiarity with the research area on economic behavior. The experiment consisted in making nine repeated choices in a lottery game. Participants started the experiment with R$1000 (a thousand) fictitious reais (Brazilian currency); each lottery game had a cost of 150 reais, and the profits returned this invested value with an addition of more 150 reais. The results indicate that the presence of feedback induces participants to bet more. However, the winning and losing probability do not influence the invested amount, and there was no interaction between these two factors.
Skapandet av tillit i en riskkontext. Om social riskacceptans vid lokalisering av anläggningar för radioaktivt och miljöfarligt avfall
Taking Beck’s and Giddens’ recent formulation of the society’s new conditions for gaining trust as theoretical point of departure, this article focusses trust and risk with regard to hazardous and radioactive waste disposal in Sweden. Seeing trust as intimately connected with cognitive understanding of risks, the information strategies of the companies with responsibility for hazardous and radioactive waste management are analysed. Central in gaining trust is the creation of access points - points of connection between lay individuals or collectivities and the representatives of expert systems - at which trust can be built up or maintained. This article emphasizes that this kind of locational conflict is to be seen as a struggle concerning the cognitive understanding of risk-generating activities, and the question is to what extent the cognitive understanding of nuclear companies will be accepted among the affected local population and to what extent the local population will develop and maintain an alternative cognitive understanding.
Media reports say that high earners and syndicates buy lottery tickets in bulk. Experimental evidence shows that agents aggressively bid in auctions and contests. Do people try to trade-off probability of winning with other basic risk dimensions (for example, cost) to achieve a subjective threshold probability of winning (in environments they can) even when such choices are second-order stochastic dominated? The literature on risky choices suggests so. In the main design of this experiment, we deconstruct the expected value with variance and skewness of a lottery with Bernoulli distribution to examine the decision-making process. Based on the results, a proportion is classified as expected utility maximizer (EUM)1 while another proportion seems to achieve a subjective threshold probability of winning (termed as target probability of winning (TPW)). More TPWs prefer higher probabilities compared to EUMs in a constant value lottery set which may explain the preference for negative skewness in experiments. Additionally, we test two contest designs and find TPWs in the population which may explain the puzzle of equilibrium effort more than risk-neutral Nash equilibrium in experiments.
Humans are notoriously bad at understanding probabilities, exhibiting a host of biases and distortions that are context dependent. This has serious consequences on how we assess risks and make decisions. Several theories have been developed to replace the normative rational expectation theory at the foundation of economics. These approaches essentially assume that (subjective) probabilities weight multiplicatively the utilities of the alternatives offered to the decision maker, although evidence suggest that probability weights and utilities are often not separable in the mind of the decision maker. In this context, we introduce a simple and efficient framework on how to describe the inherently probabilistic human decision-making process, based on a representation of the deliberation activity leading to a choice through stochastic processes, the simplest of which is a random walk. Our model leads naturally to the hypothesis that probabilities and utilities are entangled dual characteristics of the real human decision making process. It predicts the famous fourfold pattern of risk preferences. Through the analysis of choice probabilities, it is possible to identify two previously postulated features of prospect theory: the inverse S-shaped subjective probability as a function of the objective probability and risk-seeking behavior in the loss domain. It also predicts observed violations of stochastic dominance, while it does not when the dominance is “evident”. Extending the model to account for human finite deliberation time and the effect of time pressure on choice, it provides other sound predictions: inverse relation between choice probability and response time, preference reversal with time pressure, and an inverse double-S-shaped probability weighting function. Our theory, which offers many more predictions for future tests, has strong implications for psychology, economics and artificial intelligence.
The term ‘risk management’ implies that risk is something which can be quantified, predicted and controlled. This paper seeks to demonstrate the limits of this assumption where complex projects are involved. The argument is based upon a case study of a failed £80 million IT venture known as Taurus. Analysis focuses upon the relationship between politics and the assumption of risk. Acceptance of risk, it is argued, is ultimately determined by the balance of power between decision makers. Moreover, risk analysis and other techniques of management may actually compound the difficulties by fostering an illusion of control and escalation. The implications for project management are discussed.
We provide a review and analysis of much of the published literature on decision making that is relevant to the design of immersive environments. This review draws from the basic and applied literature in order to provide insight for the design of such synthetic environments. Included in this review are articles and books cited in other works, and articles and books obtained from an Internet search. Issues discussed are (a) an overview of immersive decision environments; (b) dual-process decision making; (c) training robust intuitive decision making; (d) combining analytical and intuitive processing in immersive environments; and (e) concluding remarks. For the development of robust decision making in immersive environments, intuitive reasoning should be emphasized by creating an immersive situation and by providing for the development of automatic processing through implicit learning, with the latter reinforced by explicit thought processes. Considerations of the literature on decision making will provide insight for future design solutions for immersive decision environments. © 2009, Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. All rights reserved.
Wenn Menschen sich zwischen Optionen entscheiden, so tun sie dies meistens im Hinblick auf die möglichen Konsequenzen, die mit diesen Optionen verbunden sind. Implizit oder explizit bewerten sie die Konsequenzen, und diese Bewertungen bestimmen die Wahl einer der verfügbaren Optionen. Wenn die Konsequenzen sicher sind, ist die Wahl allein durch die Bewertungen bestimmt. Wenn die Konsequenzen unsicher sind, spielt auch eine Rolle, wie wahrscheinlich es ist, dass sie eintreffen. In diesem und im nächsten Kapitel beschäftigen wir uns mit dem Fall sicherer Konsequenzen, in Kap. 6 behandeln wir dann den Fall unsicherer Konsequenzen.
Economics is not psychology, nor is it meant to be. But there is no escaping the psychological issues that run through economic risk theory. Likewise, psychological risk theory is bound by its economic origins. These common threads are nowhere more in need of unraveling than in the debate between the French and the American schools of risk theory.
Behavioral Decision Research (BDR) aims to elaborate the aspects of judgment and choice behavior along with a good understanding of psychology which helps in improving the decision making behavior of an individual. The field of behavioral decision research is vast and this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the subject. While forming ideas and beliefs about actions that are not certain, multiattribute preferences, taking calculated risks while making a final decision, as well as a structured decision making process, help integrate the discussion on BDR. Difficulties in decision making, aspects of rationality and decision making strategies based on multinominal logit model, and many other probabilistic choice models unravel the complicacies of the entire decision making process. The effect of emotions on decision making by making the problem more complex is also given importance in this chapter. In the field of BDR, understanding decision processing requires sophisticated tools and with the help of these, both cognitive and emotional influences on the decision making process can be analyzed. Better understanding of the decision making process of individuals has been greatly facilitated by recent advances in BDR.
Subjects’ preferences for a set of multi-outcome lotteries were assessed, and then subjects were exposed to a feedback period in which they played the lotteries and received information concerning outcomes. Afterward, preferences were reassessed. Most subjects’ preferences were risk averse in the prefeedback assessment, regardless of whether they were making single decisions (short-run condition) or choices for repeated plays (long-run condition), but long-run subjects were less risk averse than short-run subjects. In the postfeedback assessment, about half of the subjects in each condition became risk seeking and the other half maintained their risk-averse preferences. There were, however, differences between short-run and long-run subjects in the postfeedback pattern of risk seeking.
The period since 1980 has seen the emergence of venture capital as an area of academic interest and research activity. This interest is merited given the importance of venture capital to economic development and new venture creation. This paper surveys venture capital research since 1981. Based upon that research, a descriptive model of the venture capital process is proposed. The model is then used to develop suggestions for future research topics. Suggestions for improving research methodology are also included.
The alternation bias is the tendency of people to believe that random events alternate more often than statistical laws imply. This paper examines the theoretical effect of this psychological bias on preferences over repeated investments by using a model of the belief in the law of small numbers. An alternation bias agent (ABA) has a different perception to a rational agent (RA) about the outcome distribution of the sum of n realisations of a lottery. The results show that an ABA, that maximises expected utility, could reject a single realisation of a lottery while accepting several repetitions in accordance with Paul Samuelson's fallacy of large numbers. Furthermore, the explanation of this type of preference, based on the alternation bias, is compatible with previous behavioural accounts. A more general result shows that the alternation bias increases (decreases) the expected utility of the perceived sum of identically distributed lotteries if individuals are risk averse (risk seekers).
Behavioral Decision Research (BDR) aims to elaborate the aspects of judgment and choice behavior along with a good understanding of psychology which helps in improving the decision making behavior of an individual. The field of behavioral decision research is vast and this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the subject. While forming ideas and beliefs about actions that are not certain, multiattribute preferences, taking calculated risks while making a final decision, as well as a structured decision making process, help integrate the discussion on BDR. Difficulties in decision making, aspects of rationality and decision making strategies based on multinominal logit model, and many other probabilistic choice models unravel the complicacies of the entire decision making process. The effect of emotions on decision making by making the problem more complex is also given importance in this chapter. In the field of BDR, understanding decision processing requires sophisticated tools and with the help of these, both cognitive and emotional influences on the decision making process can be analyzed. Better understanding of the decision making process of individuals has been greatly facilitated by recent advances in BDR.
Judgment and decision making is an interdisciplinary field with many facets. Psychological approaches primarily focus on describing and understanding human behavior in (experimental) decision-making situations. Various methods to elicit judgments are described. Numerical probability estimates are evaluated according to rules derived from probability theory—that is, coherence—and overall accuracy-that is calibration. Experiments show under what circumstances coherence is violated and judgments are not well calibrated. Theoretical approaches to account for the observed behavior are presented: heuristics and bias-based models, including affect heuristic, fast and frugal heuristics; signal detection-based models; ecological models; error models; and dual-process models.The second part of the chapter describes six different types of decision making: (1) Decision making under risk and uncertainty in which each course of action produces a set of possible consequences; (2) intertemporal decision making in which a person has to choose among actions that have future consequences; (3) multi-attribute decision making under certainty with conflicting attributes; (4) experience-based decision making, in which a person learns to make decisions from trial-by-trial experience and feedback; (5) dynamic decision making in which the person must make a plan for a sequence of decisions across time; (6) decision neuroscience.Keywords:heuristics;biases;risk;multi-attribute;experienced based;dynamic
En este trabajo se presentan algunas de las características de los estudios de toma de decisiones en psicología, centrándose en las decisiones individuales en ambiente de riesgo (con probabilidades conocidas). En primer lugar aparecen algunas consideraciones históricas respecto del origen de la toma de decisiones y a continuación se centra el tema con referencia a la psicología matemática y a la cognitiva. En el punto siguiente se tratan brevemente algunos de los tópicos de mayor relevancia en toma de decisiones (la tarea, el decisor y la respuesta) y posteriormente se discuten las distintas formas de concebir los modelos en su aspecto más general -descriptivos versus normativos- y se comentan las aportaciones de la teoría de la utilidad esperada (Von Neumann y Morgenstern, 1944). Como resultado de la progresiva psicologización de las teorías comportamentales de la toma de decisiones con riesgo se presenta a grandes rasgos la aproximación de Kahneman y Tversky (1979), concluyendo con un intento de panorama integrador de los estudios de toma de decisiones.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.