Predictably intransitive preferences

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Butler, David J
Pogrebna, Ganna
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2018
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Abstract

The transitivity axiom is common to nearly all descriptive and normative utility theories of choice under risk. Contrary to both intuition and common assumption, the little-known ’Steinhaus-Trybula paradox’ shows the relation ’stochastically greater than’ will not always be transitive, in contradiction of Weak Stochastic Transitivity. We bespoke-design pairs of lotteries inspired by the paradox, over which individual preferences might cycle. We run an experiment to look for evidence of cycles, and violations of expansion/contraction consistency between choice sets. Even after considering possible stochastic but transitive explanations, we show that cycles can be the modal preference pattern over these simple lotteries, and we find systematic violations of expansion/contraction consistency.

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Judgment and Decision Making

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13

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3

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© The Author(s) 2018. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Behavioural economics

Decision making

Psychology

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