Kiel Working Papers, Kiel Institute for World Economics
No 1396:
An Experimental Investigation of Violations of Transitivity in Choice under Uncertainty
Michael H. Birnbaun and Ulrich Schmidt
Abstract: Several models of choice under uncertainty imply
systematic violations of transitivity of preference. Our experiments
explored whether people show patterns of intransitivity predicted by these
models. To distinguish “true” violations from those produced by “error,” a
model was fit in which each choice can have a different error rate and each
person can have a different pattern of true preferences that does not need
to be transitive. Error rate for a choice is estimated from preference
reversals between repeated presentations of the same choice. Our results
showed that very few people repeated intransitive patterns. We can retain
the hypothesis that transitivity best describes the data of the vast
majority of participants.
Keywords: decision making, errors, regret theory, transitivity; (follow links to similar papers)
JEL-Codes: C91,; D81; (follow links to similar papers)
31 pages, January 2008
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