Attitudes toward choice with incomplete preferences: An experimental study

Ritxar Arlegi, Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde and Mikel Hualde

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2022, vol. 204, issue C, 663-679

Abstract: We present an experiment to test different individual attitudes toward choice, such as preference for flexibility, choice aversion, betweenness and choice neutrality. Unlike other related experimental papers, we want to analyze whether different choice attitudes can coexist for the same subject, depending on the characteristics of the choice set she is facing. In particular, our main hypothesis is that the presence of incomparability among the alternatives in the choice set, and the time at which such incomparability is solved, affect crucially the kind of attitude towards choice that the subject will exhibit. We find that, indeed, choice attitudes are not homogeneous across choice sets, yet they are conditional on the preferences over the alternatives. We also find some evidence supporting that subjects tend to value heuristically sets as a whole.

Keywords: Incomplete preferences; Choice aversion; Preference for flexibility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D01 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:204:y:2022:i:c:p:663-679

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2022.09.027

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