Risky decision making: Testing for violations of transitivity predicted by an editing mechanism

Journal article

Transitivity is the assumption that if a person prefers A to B and B to C, then that person should prefer A to C. This article explores a paradigm in which Birnbaum, Patton and Lott (1999) thought people might be systematically intransitive. Many undergraduates choose C = ($96, .85; $90, .05; $12, .10) over A = ($96, .9; $14, .05; $12, .05), violating dominance. Perhaps people would detect dominance in simpler choices, such as A versus B = ($96, .9; $12, .10) and B versus C, and yet continue to violate it in the choice between A and C, which would violate transitivity. In this study we apply a true and error model to test intransitive preferences predicted by a partially effective editing mechanism. The results replicated previous findings quite well; however, the true and error model indicated that very few, if any, participants exhibited true intransitive preferences. In addition, violations of stochastic dominance showed a strong and systematic decrease in prevalence over time and violated response independence, thus violating key assumptions of standard random preference models for analysis of transitivity. Keywords: transitivity, true and error models, dominance, stochastic dominance, preference models

Authors: Quispe-Torreblanca, E; Birnbaum, M; Navarro-Martinez, D; Ungemach, C; Stewart, N

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Society for Judgment and Decision Making
• Journal: Judgment and Decision Making
• Volume: 11
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 75–91
• Publication date: 2016-01-01
• Acceptance date: 2015-12-31
• ISSN: 1930-2975
• Keywords: SBTMR