Violations of economic rationality due to irrelevant information during learning in decision from experience

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• dc.contributor.author Spektor, Mikhail
• dc.contributor.author Seidler, Hannah
• dc.date.accessioned 2023-05-05T09:43:15Z
• dc.date.available 2023-05-05T09:43:15Z
• dc.date.issued 2023
• dc.description.abstract According to normative decision-making theories, the composition of a choice set should not affect people’s preferences regarding the different options. This assumption contrasts with decades of research that have identified multiple situations in which this principle is violated, leading to context effects. Recently, research on context effects has been extended to the domain of experience-based choices, where it has been shown that forgone outcomes from irrelevant alternatives affect preferences — an accentuation effect. More specifically, it has been shown that an option presented in a situation in which its outcomes are salient across several trials is evaluated more positively than in a context in which its outcomes are less salient. In the present study, we investigated whether irrelevant information affects preferences as much as relevant information. In two experiments, individuals completed a learning task with partial feedback. We found that past outcomes from non-chosen options, which contain no relevant information at all, led to the same accentuation effect as did counterfactual outcomes that provided new and relevant information. However, if the information is entirely irrelevant (from options that could not have been chosen), individuals ignored it, thus ruling out a purely perceptual account of the accentuation effect. These results provide further support for the influence of salience on learning and highlight the necessity of mechanistic accounts in decision-making research.
• dc.description.sponsorship The authors thank David Kellen for helpful comments and suggestions. Mikhail Spektor gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Spanish State Research Agency (AEI) through the Severo Ochoa Programme for Centres of Excellence in R&D (CEX2019–000915–S), the Spanish Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation (MINECO) through the Juan de la Cierva fellowship (FJC2019–040970–I), the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICINN; project PID2019–105249GB–I00), and the BBVA Foundation (project G999088Q). Data of the reported experiments and model codes are available at https://osf.io/s52z8/. 1 Notably, the influence of distinctiveness is assumed to be sign-independent, so X would be chosen more often following a relatively bad-but-salient outcome than in a situation in which the same outcome is not as salient (e.g., when there are only two options available for choice).
• dc.format.mimetype application/pdf
• dc.identifier.citation Spektor MS, Seidler H. Violations of economic rationality due to irrelevant information during learning in decision from experience. Judgment and Decision Making. 2022 Mar;17(2):425-48. DOI: 10.1017/S1930297500009177
• dc.identifier.doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1930297500009177
• dc.identifier.issn 1930-2975
• dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/10230/56692
• dc.language.iso eng
• dc.publisher Cambridge University Press
• dc.relation.ispartof Judgment and Decision Making. 2022 Mar;17(2):425-48
• dc.relation.projectID info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/2PE/CEX2019-000915-S
• dc.relation.projectID info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/2PE/PID2019-105249GB-I00
• dc.rights Copyright © The Authors [2022] This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
• dc.rights.accessRights info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
• dc.rights.uri http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• dc.subject.keyword Accentuation effect
• dc.subject.keyword Context effects
• dc.subject.keyword Decision making
• dc.subject.keyword Decisions from experience
• dc.subject.keyword Reinforcement learning
• dc.title Violations of economic rationality due to irrelevant information during learning in decision from experience
• dc.type info:eu-repo/semantics/article
• dc.type.version info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion