Idiosyncratic Preferences Research Articles

Accuracy of food preference predictions in couples

The goal of this study was to identify and empirically test variables that indicate how well partners in relationships know each other's food preferences. Participants (n = 2,854) lived in the same household and were part of a large, nationally representative panel study in Germany. Each partner independently predicted the other's preferences for several common food items. Results show that predictive accuracy was higher for likes and for extreme and stereotypical preferences as compared to dislikes and for moderate and idiosyncratic preferences. Accuracy was also higher for couples with a high similarity in preferences and with longer relationship duration but was independent of participants' age after controlling for relationship duration. The data also show that relationship duration was accompanied by higher similarity in couples' food preferences. There was a small positive correlation between partner knowledge and both partner similarity and satisfaction with family life, but no correlation between partner knowledge and general life satisfaction. The results reconcile both valence and base-rate accounts of preference prediction accuracy.

The role of trading frictions in financial markets

We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model to analyze the role of trading frictions in over-the-counter markets. In our model, agents face idiosyncratic preference shocks and a financial market allows them to rebalance their portfolio composed of money and bonds in response to these shocks. We disentangle the effects of search and bargaining on welfare and study each one of them. We show that bargaining is generally welfare-improving, while search frictions are not. This is because search frictions do not only affect the demand for the respective assets, but also their allocation.

The music that helps people sleep and the reasons they believe it works: A mixed methods analysis of online survey reports.

Sleep loss is a widespread problem with serious physical and economic consequences. Music can impact upon physical, psychological and emotional states, which may explain anecdotal reports of its success as an everyday sleep aid. However, there is a lack of systematic data on how widely it is used, why people opt for music as a sleep aid, or what music works; hence the underlying drivers to music-sleep effects remain unclear. We investigated music as a sleep aid within the general public via a mixed methods data online survey (n = 651) that scored musicality, sleep habits, and open text responses on what music helps sleep and why. In total, 62% of respondents stated that they used music to help them sleep. They reported fourteen musical genres comprising 545 artists. Linear modelling found stress, age, and music use as significant predictors of sleep quality (PSQI) scores. Regression tree modelling revealed that younger people with higher musical engagement were significantly more likely to use music to aid sleep. Thematic analysis of the open text responses generated four themes that described why people believe music helps sleep: music offers unique properties that stimulate sleep (Provide), music is part of a normal sleep routine (Habit), music induces a physical or mental state conducive to sleep (State), and music blocks an internal or external stimulus that would otherwise disrupt sleep (Distract). This survey provides new evidence into the relationship between music and sleep in a population that ranged widely in age, musicality, sleep habits and stress levels. In particular, the results highlight the varied pathways of effect between music and sleep. Diversity was observed both in music choices, which reflected idiosyncratic preferences rather than any consistent musical structure, and in the reasons why music supports good sleep, which went far beyond simple physical/mental relaxation.

Ribosomal flavours: an acquired taste for specific mRNAs?

The regulation of translation is critical in almost every aspect of gene expression. Nonetheless, the ribosome is historically viewed as a passive player in this process. However, evidence is accumulating to suggest that variations in the ribosome can have an important influence on which mRNAs are translated. Scope for variation is provided via multiple avenues, including heterogeneity at the level of both ribosomal proteins and ribosomal RNAs and their covalent modifications. Together, these variations provide the potential for hundreds, if not thousands, of flavours of ribosome, each of which could have idiosyncratic preferences for the translation of certain messenger RNAs. Indeed, perturbations to this heterogeneity appear to affect specific subsets of transcripts and manifest as cell-type-specific diseases. This review provides a historical perspective of the ribosomal code hypothesis, before outlining the various sources of heterogeneity, their regulation and functional consequences for the cell.

Idiosyncratic preferences in motion transparency and binocular rivalry are dissociable

Idiosyncratic preferences in motion transparency and binocular rivalry are dissociable

Idiosyncratic directional preferences in ambiguous perception are not modified to reduce ambiguity

Idiosyncratic directional preferences in ambiguous perception are not modified to reduce ambiguity

Estimation of Sequential Search Models

We propose a new likelihood-based estimation method for the sequential search model. By allowing search costs to be heterogeneous across consumers and products, we can directly compute the joint probability of the search sequence and the purchase decision when consumers are searching for the idiosyncratic preference shocks in their utility functions. Under this procedure, one recursively makes random draws for each dimension that requires numerical integration to simulate the probabilities associated with the purchase decision and the search sequence under the sequential search algorithm. We then present details from an extensive simulation study that compares the proposed approach with existing estimation methods recently used for sequential search model estimation, viz., the kernel-smoothed frequency simulator (KSFS) and the crude frequency simulator (CFS). In the empirical application, we apply the proposed method to the Expedia dataset from Kaggle which has previously been analyzed using the KSFS estimator and the assumption of homogeneous search costs. We demonstrate that the proposed method has a better predictive performance associated with differences in the estimated effects of various drivers of clicks and purchases, and highlight the importance of the heterogeneous search costs assumption even when KSFS is used to estimate the sequential search model. Lastly, from a managerial perspective, we show that sorting products by their expected utilities can enhance consumer welfare and increase the number of transactions.

Decomposing Public Opinion Variation into Ideology, Idiosyncrasy, and Instability

We propose a method for decomposing variation in the issue preferences that US citizens express on surveys into three sources of variability that correspond to major threads in public opinion research. We find that, averaging across a set of high-profile US political issues, a single ideological dimension accounts for about 1/7 of opinion variation, individuals’ idiosyncratic preferences account for about 3/7, and response instability for the remaining 3/7. These shares vary substantially across issue types, and the average share attributable to ideology doubles when a second ideological dimension is permitted. We also find that (unidimensional) ideology accounts for almost twice as much response variation (and response instability is substantially lower) among respondents with high, rather than low, political knowledge. Our estimation strategy is based on an ordinal probit model with random effects and is applicable to other data sets that include repeated measurements of ordinal issue position data.

When Seeking the Best Brings Out the Worst in Consumers: Understanding the Relationship between a Maximizing Mindset and Immoral Behavior

Consumers often adopt a goal to choose “the best” option: be it the best value for their money, the product with the highest quality, or the product that offers the best match to their idiosyncratic preferences. Prior work has characterized this orientation as a “maximizing mindset,” and has demonstrated that the adoption of a maximizing mindset can lead to both positive and negative consequences for the self. However, to date, little is known about if a maximizing mindset might have consequences beyond the self (i.e., for others and/or society). The current article addresses this gap by demonstrating that consumers who adopt a maximizing mindset (vs. a neutral mindset) are subsequently more likely to engage in immoral behaviors. Further, we demonstrate that this effect occurs because a maximizing mindset activates cognitions related to scarcity. In doing so, the current research offers a more nuanced understanding of the psychological and behavioral consequences of a maximizing mindset and identifies a maximizing mindset as an antecedent to cognitions related to scarcity and immoral behaviors.

Foodways and the Archaeology of Colonial Contact: Rethinking the Western Zhou Expansion in Shandong

ABSTRACTFoodways, as powerful social practices influencing the demarcation and maintenance of group identity, provide an important element for the study and inspection of cases of colonial culture contact in the archaeological record. Even as archaeologists engage with theoretical perspectives that highlight nuanced frameworks of colonial contact, poor data sets often result in only the most basic utilizations of postcolonial theoretical perspectives. By looking at archaeological assemblages through the lens of foodways, seemingly mute archaeological artifacts—principally, ceramics—can be studied to reveal community foodways reflected in specific local utilizations and their role in the creation of a foodway habitus. Focusing on the entanglements of artifacts in locally specific community practices, the impact and results of colonial contact on the foodway habitus can be revealed. Illustrating our argument is a case study from Bronze Age China, where the study of ceramics as evidence of foodways reveals a new understanding of the Western Zhou (1050–771 BCE) colonial expansion. Rather than view specific vessel types and styles as perfectly corresponding to group identity, cooking and serving vessels should be investigated to uncover the idiosyncratic preferences of the communities who used them, and through them their ancient foodway habitus. [foodways, social identity, colonial contact, ancient China]

Fast and Slow Learning From Reviews

This paper develops a model of Bayesian learning from online reviews, and investigates the conditions for asymptotic learning of the quality of a product and the speed of learning under different rating systems. A rating system provides information about reviews left by previous customers. A sequence of potential customers decide whether to join the platform. After joining and observing the ratings of the product, and conditional on her ex ante valuation, a customer decides whether to purchase or not. If she purchases, the true quality of the product, her ex ante valuation, an ex post idiosyncratic preference term and the price of the product determine her overall satisfaction. Given the rating system of the platform, she decides to leave a review as a function of her overall satisfaction. We study learning dynamics under two classes of rating systems: full history, where customers see the full history of reviews, and summary statistics, where the platform reports some summary statistics of past reviews. In both cases, learning dynamics are complicated by a selection effect — the types of users who purchase the good and thus their overall satisfaction and reviews depend on the information that they have available at the time of their purchase. We provide conditions for asymptotic learning under both full history and summary statistics, and show how the selection effect becomes more difficult to correct for with summary statistics. Conditional on asymptotic learning, the speed (rate) of learning is always exponential and is governed by similar forces under both types of rating systems, though the exact rates differ. Using this characterization, we provide the rate of learning under several different types of rating systems. We show that providing more information does not always lead to faster learning, but strictly finer rating systems always do. We also illustrate how different rating systems, with the same distribution of preferences, can lead to very fast or very slow speeds of learning.

Modeling Information Diffusion over Social Networks for Temporal Dynamic Prediction

Modeling the process of information diffusion is a challenging problem. Although numerous attempts have been made in order to solve this problem, very few studies are actually able to simulate and predict temporal dynamics of the diffusion process. In this paper, we propose a novel information diffusion model, namely GT model, which treats the nodes of a network as intelligent and rational agents and then calculates their corresponding payoffs, given different choices to make strategic decisions. By introducing time-related payoffs based on the diffusion data, the proposed GT model can be used to predict whether or not the user's behaviors will occur in a specific time interval. The user’s payoff can be divided into two parts: social payoff from the user’s social contacts and preference payoff from the user’s idiosyncratic preference. We here exploit the global influence of the user and the social influence between any two users to accurately calculate the social payoff. In addition, we develop a new method of presenting social influence that can fully capture the temporal dynamics of social influence. Experimental results from two different datasets, Sina Weibo and Flickr demonstrate the rationality and effectiveness of the proposed prediction method with different evaluation metrics.

Social Media and Product Line Design

It is common for consumers to rely on opinion leaders, who presumably have a higher expertise in the product category, to form beliefs about the product quality. At the same time, the evaluations and product adoptions of opinion leaders are influenced both by the product quality and by their idiosyncratic preferences (fit). When opinion leaders do not provide a very detailed review, their followers need to form expectations of how much the opinion leader's recommendation is driven by product quality and how much it is driven by an idiosyncratic fit of the product to the opinion leader. This paper considers how the firm should adjust its optimal choice of the product variety in the presence of word of mouth, given that the opinion leader is likely to have more expertise and therefore, be better able to choose the version of the product that fits her best. It shows that while the opinion leader's presence may be a force toward either an increased or decreased number of variants, generally speaking, the distortion is upward if it is more difficult to satisfy the opinion leaders, which could be either due to the higher importance of fit or due to their higher standards. We further show that the firm's knowledge of the true quality may increase the distortion of the number of product variants it offers even when the equilibrium number of variants is pooling across the product qualities.

The Delegate Paradox: Why Polarized Politicians Can Represent Citizens Best

Many advocate for political reforms intended to resolve apparent disjunctures between politicians’ ideologically polarized policy positions and citizens’ less polarized policy preferences. We show these apparent disjunctures can arise even when politicians represent their constituencies well and that resolving them would likely degrade representation. These counterintuitive results arise from a paradox whereby polarized politicians can best represent constituencies composed of citizens with idiosyncratic preferences. We document this paradox among US House members, often criticized for excessive polarization. We show that if House members represented their constituencies’ preferences as closely as possible, they would still appear polarized. Moreover, current members nearly always represent their constituencies better than counterfactual less polarized members. A series of experiments confirms that even “moderate” citizens usually prefer ostensibly polarized representatives to many less polarized alternatives.

Delay discounting and utility for money or weight loss.

SummaryObjectiveObesity is related to a bias towards smaller immediate over larger delayed rewards. This bias is typically examined by studying single commodity discounting. However, weight loss often involves choices among multiple commodities. To our knowledge, no research has examined delay discounting of delayed weight loss compared with other commodities.MethodsWe examined single commodity discounting of money and cross commodity discounting of money and weight loss in a sample of 84 adults with obesity or overweight statuses interested in weight loss. The exchange rate between money and weight loss was calculated, and participants completed two delay discounting tasks: money now versus money later and money now versus weight loss later.ResultsParticipants discounted weight loss more than money (p < 0.001). When participants were divided into those who preferred weight loss (n = 61) versus money (n = 23), those who preferred money over weight loss discounted weight loss even more than individuals that preferred weight loss (p = 0.003).ConclusionsGreater discounting of weight loss for those who preferred money suggest that idiosyncratic preferences are related to multiple commodity discounting, and greater discounting of weight loss across all participants provide insight on important challenges for weight control.

Priority-driven behaviors under the Boston mechanism

We study school choice markets where the non-strategy-proof Boston mechanism is used to assign students to schools. Inspired by previous field and experimental evidence, we analyze a type of behavior called priority-driven: students have a common ranking over the schools and then give a bonus in their submitted preferences to those schools for which they have high priority. We first prove that under this behavior, there is a unique stable and efficient matching, which is the outcome of the Boston mechanism. Second, we show that the three most prominent mechanisms on school choice (Boston, deferred acceptance, and top trading cycles) coincide when students’ submitted preferences are priority-driven. Finally, we run some computational simulations to show that the assumption of priority-driven preferences can be relaxed by introducing an idiosyncratic preference component, and our qualitative results carry over to a more general model of preferences.

On the dialectal variations of voiced sibilant /dz/ in Taiwan Min young speakers

This study examined the realization of /dz/ in three dialects of Taiwan Min among young speakers based on a paragraph-reading task. Results showed there were five robust realization categories of /dz/, including the commonly reported dental sibilants, velar obstruents, and liquids and the rarely mentioned dental nonsibilants and retroflexes. Liquids and retroflexes were more likely to occur before a rounded segment, while dental sibilants, dental nonsibilants, and velar obstruents were more likely to occur before an unrounded segment. For the latter environment, there was also a correlation between structural complexity and realization of dental sibilants, velar obstruents, and liquids. The three dialects examined demonstrated different attitudes towards the realization of /dz/. 泉 Chôan was the most receptive to the new sounds of liquids, dental nonsibilants, and retroflexes, while Mix was the most conservative in preserving the old forms of dental sibilants and velar obstruents. 漳 Chiang was somewhere in between. It maintained a robust dental sibilant category like Mix yet welcomed new variants of dental nonsibilants and retroflexes like Chôan. Talkers were consistent in their /dz/ realization choices and intra-talker variability was low. This study thus demonstrated that talkers’ realization of a variable sound is a complex product of linguistic structure, speakers’ background, and idiosyncratic preference.

The Delegate Paradox: Why Polarized Politicians Can Represent Citizens Best

Many advocate political reforms intended to resolve apparent disjunctures between politicians’ ideologically polarized policy positions and citizens’ less-polarized policy preferences. We show these apparent disjunctures can arise even when politicians represent their constituencies well, and that resolving them would likely degrade representation. These counterintuitive results arise from a paradox whereby polarized politicians can best represent constituencies comprised of citizens with idiosyncratic preferences. We document this paradox among U.S. House Members, often criticized for excessive polarization. We show that if House Members represented their constituencies’ preferences as closely as possible, they would still appear polarized. Moreover, current Members nearly always represent their constituencies better than counterfactual less-polarized Members. A series of experiments confirms that even “moderate” citizens often prefer ostensibly polarized representatives to many less-polarized alternatives.

Why One's Practical Reasons Are Not Just One's Own Private Affair

In this paper I take a stance in the debate concerning the private or public quality of practical reasons by arguing that – far from amounting to statements of personal concerns – practical reasons are inherently public, or constitutively shared, standards. Accordingly, an agent’s reasons are not concerns that only the agent takes as grounded, whereas other individuals may legitimately fail to recognise them. Insofar as one has a reason for action, that action is supported by a statement that others cannot refrain from treating as a sound basis for action without misunderstanding the predicament at stake. The view I defend here is, therefore, that one’s practical reasons are essentially public considerations in a specific sense, namely, they ought to be recognised as valuable justifications for action not only by the agent but by anyone else, including those who may have different, or even conflicting, interests. Related, idiosyncratic preferences, private motives, personal interests and the like cannot be regarded as practical reasons, since, no consideration can be qualified as a practical reason unless it is intersubjectively acknowledgeable as a meaningful supporting ground of action and so it makes normative claims a generality of subjects, as opposed to just the agent, will have to regard as (at least presumptively and defeasibly) valid.

When Seeking the Best Brings out the Worst in Consumers: Understanding the Relationship between a Maximizing Mindset and Immoral Behavior

Consumers often adopt a goal to choose “the best” option: be it the best value for their money, the product with the highest quality, or the product that offers the best match to their idiosyncratic preferences. Prior work has characterized this orientation as a “maximizing mindset,” and has demonstrated that the adoption of a maximizing mindset can lead to both positive and negative consequences for the self. However, to date, little is known about if a maximizing mindset might have consequences beyond the self (i.e., for others and/or society). The current article addresses this gap by demonstrating that consumers who adopt a maximizing mindset (vs. a neutral mindset) are subsequently more likely to engage in immoral behaviors. Further, we demonstrate that this effect occurs because a maximizing mindset activates cognitions related to scarcity. In doing so, the current research offers a more nuanced understanding of the psychological and behavioral consequences of a maximizing mindset, and identifies a maximizing mindset as an antecedent to cognitions related to scarcity and immoral behaviors.