Revealed Indifference: Using Response Times to Infer Preferences

Arkady Konovalov and Ian Krajbich ()
Additional contact information
Ian Krajbich: Department of Economics, Ohio State University

No 16-01, Working Papers from Ohio State University, Department of Economics

Abstract: Revealed preference is the dominant approach for inferring preferences, but it relies on discrete, stochastic choices. The choice process also produces response times (RTs) which are continuous and can often be observed in the absence of informative choice outcomes. Moreover, there is a consistent relationship between RTs and strength-of-preference, namely that people make slower decisions as they approach indifference. This relationship arises from optimal solutions to sequential information sampling problems. Here, we investigate several ways in which this relationship can be used to infer preferences when choice outcomes are uninformative or unavailable. We show that RTs from a single binary-choice problem are enough to usefully rank people according to their degree of loss aversion. Using a large number of choice problems, we are further able to recover individual utility-function parameters from RTs alone (no choice outcomes) in three different choice domains. Finally, we are able to use long RTs to predict which choices are inconsistent with a subject’s utility function and likely to later be reversed. These results provide a proof of concept for a novel “method of revealed indifference”.

Keywords: preferences; response times; sequential sampling models; drift diffusion model; experimental methodology; social preference; loss aversion; temporal discounting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D01 D03 D81 D87 D90 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 57 Pages
Date: 2016-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm, nep-exp, nep-neu and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.econ.ohio-state.edu/pdf/krajbich/wp16-01.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osu:osuewp:16-01

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Ohio State University, Department of Economics 410 Arps Hall 1945 North High Street Columbus, Ohio 43210-1172.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by John Slaughter ().