Work

Reply to Davis-Stober et al.: Violations of rationality in a psychophysical task are not aggregation artifacts

Year: 2016

Type: letter

Abstract: Humans deviate from rational choice theory if their estimates of the attribute values for one alternative change as a function of the attribute values of competing alternatives (1). In our paper (2), we report such “context-dependent” (CD) deviations from rationality in the form of a frequent winner (FW) effect and the corresponding weak stochastic transitivity (WST) violations. Davis-Stober et al. (3) claim that this observation is an artifact of aggregating over different trial types, and suggest that a context-independent (CI) decision model might explain our data. We thank Davis-Stober et al. (3) for drawing attention to a potentially important issue. However, we find their analysis to be misleading. Below, we comprehensively rebut their claims and present evidence that corroborates our original findings.

Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1608989113

Authors: Konstantinos Tsetsos, Rani Moran, James C. Moreland, Nick Chater, Marius Usher, Christopher Summerfield

Institutions: Birkbeck, University of London, Tel Aviv University, University of Washington, University of Warwick, University of Oxford

Language: English

Topic: Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics

Subfield: General Decision Sciences

Field: Decision Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funders: British Academy, European Research Council

Award: G3226695193

OpenAlex ID: W2498215524

Cites: 3

Cited by: 5

Related to: 10