Does inducing choice procedures make individuals better off? An experimental study

Luigi Mittone; Mauro Papi

doi:10.1007/s11238-017-9590-3

Does inducing choice procedures make individuals better off? An experimental study

Luigi Mittone, Mauro Papi

Economics

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Abstract

Over the years the psychological and economic literature on multi attribute individual decision-making has focused its attention on examining what class of heuristics better describes subjects’ behaviour. In contrast, motivated by the proliferation of online choice platforms, we investigate whether inducing subjects to use holistic vs characteristic-based search (CBS) procedures has an effect on the quality of their decision by proposing a between subject experiment involving an innovative visual choice task. We find that encouraging subjects to use CBS heuristics as opposed to holistic ones makes them better off. We also examine how subjects’ performance is related with complexity, time pressure, and random choice by running simulations and link our results to the related literature.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	37–59
Number of pages	23
Journal	Theory and Decision
Volume	83
Early online date	30 Jan 2017
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/s11238-017-9590-3
Publication status	Published - Jun 2017

Keywords

between-subject
characteristic-based search
heuristic
holistic
multi-attribute problem
simulations

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10.1007/s11238-017-9590-3Licence: CC BY

Does inducing choice procedures make individuals better off? An experimental study
© The Author(s) 2017 This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made
Final published version, 964 KBLicence: CC BY

Mauro Papi
- Business School, Economics - Senior Lecturer
Person: Academic

Cite this

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title = "Does inducing choice procedures make individuals better off? An experimental study",

abstract = "Over the years the psychological and economic literature on multi attribute individual decision-making has focused its attention on examining what class of heuristics better describes subjects{\textquoteright} behaviour. In contrast, motivated by the proliferation of online choice platforms, we investigate whether inducing subjects to use holistic vs characteristic-based search (CBS) procedures has an effect on the quality of their decision by proposing a between subject experiment involving an innovative visual choice task. We find that encouraging subjects to use CBS heuristics as opposed to holistic ones makes them better off. We also examine how subjects{\textquoteright} performance is related with complexity, time pressure, and random choice by running simulations and link our results to the related literature.",

keywords = "between-subject, characteristic-based search, heuristic, holistic, multi-attribute problem, simulations",

author = "Luigi Mittone and Mauro Papi",

note = "Open access via Springer Compact Agreement We would like to thank Marco Tecilla for excellent computer programming. We are extremely grateful to an anonymous referee for her/his support to our paper, the many insightful comments, and the valuable suggestions on the research program. We also thank Miguel Costa-Gomes, Paola Manzini, Ariel Rubinstein, the participants to the 2016 International Meeting on Experimental and Behavioral Social Sciences (Rome), the seminar audiences at the universities of Aberdeen, St Andrews and Trento and the editor of this journal. Financial support from the University of Trento{\textquoteright}s core funding is gratefully acknowledged. Any error is our own responsibility.",

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Does inducing choice procedures make individuals better off? An experimental study

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