Unifying Procedure-Dependent Preference Reversals: Theory and Experiments

Abstract

Revealed preferences between alternatives can be systematically reversed across a variety of elicitation procedures (e.g., choice, valuation, matching, joint/separate evaluation). These puzzling findings have been usually invoked to challenge the procedure invariance principle. Yet procedure-dependent preferences can be endogenous. This paper presents a unifying theory of contextual deliberation to account for seemingly disparate phenomena of preference reversals. When attribute importance is ex ante imperfectly known, people can engage in costly information retrieval/acquisition activities (i.e., deliberation) prior to making decisions. Elicitation procedures can influence revealed preferences through affecting the incentive for deliberation. Therefore, contextual deliberation can endogenously yield procedure-dependent preference reversals, offer a common microfoundation for extant psychological accounts (e.g., the prominence hypothesis, the evaluability hypothesis), and coherently organize apparently unrelated/inconsistent findings in the literature. We also run five experiments and document new findings that are inconsistent with extant hypotheses but can be reconciled by contextual deliberation. This paper was accepted by Dmitri Kuksov, marketing. Funding: This work was supported by the Hong Kong Research Grant Council (RGC) General Research Fund [Grant 16500614]. Supplemental Material: The data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.02640 .