Risky Decision Making: Testing for Violations of Transitivity Predicted by an Editing Mechanism

Michael H. Birnbaum, Daniel Navarro-Martinez, Christoph Ungemach, Neil Stewart and Edika G. Quispe-Torreblanca

Judgment and Decision Making, 2016, vol. 11, issue 1, 75-91

Abstract: 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.

Date: 2016
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