True Preferences Research Articles

Choice changes preferences, not merely reflects them: A meta-analysis of the artifact-free free-choice paradigm.

One of the prominent, by now seminal, paradigms in the research tradition of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957) is the free-choice paradigm developed by Brehm (1956) to measure choice-induced preference change. Some 50 years after Brehm introduced the paradigm, Chen and Risen (2010) published an influential critique arguing that what the paradigm measures is not necessarily a choice-induced preference change, but possibly an artifact of the choice revealing existing preferences. They showed that once the artifact is experimentally controlled for, there is either no or very little evidence for choice-induced preference change. Given the prominence of the paradigm, this critique meant that much of what we thought we knew about the psychological process of cognitive dissonance might not be true. Following the critique, research using the paradigm applied various corrections to overcome the artifact. The present research examined whether choice truly changes preferences, or rather merely reflects them. We conducted a meta-analysis on 43 studies (N = 2,191), all using an artifact-free free-choice paradigm. Using different meta-analytical methods, and conceptually different analyses, including a Bayesian one, we found an overall effect size of Cohen's d = 0.40, 95% confidence interval (CI) [0.32, 0.49]. Furthermore, we found no evidence for publication bias as an alternative explanation for the choice-induced preference change effect. These results support the existence of true preference change created by choice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

University Selection Processes and Market Size: An Experimental Study

The administrator of a university selection process is often faced with allocation problems such as identifying the most talented candidates to be placed into the most sought-after university/course. This occurs because too many applicants are competing for a limited number of seats and the difficulty in identifying the qualified and interested candidate to attend the course, makes the selection process very tedious and slow. Although the selection process plays a role as a clearinghouse in allocation, the market congestion that occurred due to a large number of applications renders the process inefficient. The paper begins with the aim of studying three matching mechanisms; the Immediate Acceptance Mechanism (IAM), Deferred Acceptance Mechanism (DAM) and Efficient Transfer Mechanism (ETM), in terms of their truth-telling and stability properties in two market sizes. The parameter market size represented market congestion (i.e. a small market) and no market congestion (i.e. a large market). We find theImmediate Acceptance Mechanism lost to Deferred Acceptance and Efficient Transfer Mechanisms in terms of allocation and truth-telling; candidates in Immediate Acceptance Mechanism misreported their true preferences more to gain entry, which also rendered the mechanism less stable compared to the other two. A selection process should promote fairness in evaluation to encourage truth-telling which was found to be positively correlated with stability in allocation.

Fear not, vote truthfully: Secure Multiparty Computation of score based rules

We propose a secure voting protocol for score-based voting rules, where independent talliers perform the tallying procedure. The protocol outputs the winning candidate(s) while preserving the privacy of the voters and the secrecy of the ballots. It offers perfect secrecy, in the sense that apart from the desired output, all other information – the ballots, intermediate values, and the final scores received by each of the candidates – is not disclosed to any party, including the talliers. Such perfect secrecy may increase the voters’ confidence and, consequently, encourage them to vote according to their true preferences. The protocol is extremely lightweight, and therefore it can be easily deployed in real life voting scenarios.

David Hume, economic rationality, and policy: Symposium introduction

Abstract This is an introduction to the symposium, David Hume, Economic Rationality, and Policy. Topics treated in the symposium include the idea of true preferences; Hume's theory of preferences in relation to his economic philosophy; justice and markets as a joint coordination regime; the instability of general, inflexible rules; conservatism and liberalism; the ethics of policy innovation; Hume and classical economics; group analytics and contemporary political sociology.

Hume's experimental psychology and the idea of erroneous preferences

Abstract Hume's Treatise of Human Nature is not only a canonical text of philosophy, but also a pioneering work of psychology, anticipating many findings of modern behavioural economics. According to Hume's theory of mind, the concept of rationality does not apply to choices or moral judgements. But in his theory of justice, Hume explains preference reversals between smaller-sooner and larger-later options in terms of farsighted ‘true’ preferences and psychologically-induced errors of short-sightedness. Anticipating a common idea in behavioural welfare economics, he proposes a role for government in helping individuals to overcome self-control problems in acting justly. I examine Hume's position and assess its coherence. I conclude that Hume's theory of mind is consistent and psychologically well-grounded, but does not support the concepts of true preference and error that appear in his theory of justice. However, the fundamental logic of that theory does not depend on assumptions about self-control problems.

David Hume, Economic Rationality, and Policy: Symposium Introduction

This is an introduction to the symposium, David Hume, Economic Rationality, and Policy, forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. Topics treated in the symposium include the idea of true preferences; Hume's theory of preferences in relation to his economic philosophy; justice and markets as a joint coordination regime; the instability of general, inflexible rules; conservatism and liberalism; the ethics of policy innovation; Hume and classical economics; group analytics and contemporary political sociology.

Erratum: Chinese College Admissions and School Choice Reforms: A Theoretical Analysis

Previous articleNext article FreeErratumErratum: Chinese College Admissions and School Choice Reforms: A Theoretical AnalysisYan Chen and Onur KestenYan ChenUniversity of Michigan and Tsinghua University Search for more articles by this author and Onur KestenUniversity of Sydney Search for more articles by this author Original articleChinese College Admissions and School Choice Reforms: A Theoretical AnalysisPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreBy definition, if mechanism φe is more manipulable than mechanism φe′, then any truth-telling Nash equilibrium (where all students report their true preferences) of φe is also a Nash equilibrium of φe′. Therefore, corollary 2 (which is implied by theorem 1) in the paper “Chinese College Admissions and School Choice Reforms: A Theoretical Analysis,” published in the February 2017 issue of the Journal of Political Economy (vol. 125 (1)), is incorrect. Equilibrium comparisons in corollary 2 hold under truth telling. The corrected statement of corollary 2 is as follows.Corollary 2. Any truth-telling Nash equilibrium of the preference revelation game associated with φe is also a Nash equilibrium of that of φe′ where e′>e.Similarly, equilibrium comparisons in theorem 2 and its extension theorem 5, which invoke corollary 2, hold under truth telling. The corrected statement of theorem 2 is as follows.Theorem 2. Let e′=ke for some k∈ℕ∪{∞}. Any truth-telling equilibrium of φe that leads to a stable matching is also an equilibrium of φe′ and leads to the same stable matching. However, the converse is not true; that is, there are stable truth-telling equilibria of φe′ that neither may be equilibria nor may be stable under φe.With this modification, the converse statement in theorem 2 (and in its extension theorem 5) still holds and can easily be shown by adding an extra student (who prefers school se′ most but has the lowest priority at all schools) and an extra school (which is the least preferred by all students) to the example in the original proof. We regret the error.NotesWe thank Kentaro Tomoeda for pointing out the error in corollary 2. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Political Economy Volume 128, Number 11November 2020 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/710554 Views: 1742 HistoryPublished online October 07, 2020 © 2020 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.Related articlesChinese College Admissions and School Choice Reforms: A Theoretical Analysis20 Dec 2016Journal of Political Economy

Reanalysis of Butler and Pogrebna (2018) using true and error model

AbstractButler and Pogrebna (2018) devised triples of three-branch gambles theorized to violate transitivity of preference according to a most probable winner model. According to this model, a person chooses the option that has the higher probability to yield a better outcome than the other alternative. They tested 11 triples with 100 participants and found cases that appeared to violate weak stochastic transitivity and the triangle inequality. But tests of weak stochastic transitivity and the triangle inequality do not provide a proper method to compare transitive and intransitive models that allow mixtures of preference patterns and random errors. Those older methods can yield false conclusions regarding transitivity, for example, if different participants have different true preferences or if different choice problems have different rates of error. This paper reanalyzes their data using a true and error (TE) model, which does not require these unrealistic assumptions, and which provides estimates of the incidence of transitive and intransitive behavior in a mixture. Reanalysis indicated that 3 of the 11 triples showed convincing evidence of violations of transitivity in the opposite direction of the predictions of the most probable winner model. Further, these and other triples showed other significant violations of the most probable winner model. Despite some violations of the true and error model, the data of Butler and Pogrebna appear to contradict not only transitive utility models but they also refute the most probable winner model as a descriptive theory of choice behavior.

Local distance constrained bribery in voting

Studying complexity of various bribery problems has been one of the main research focus in computational social choice. In all the models of bribery studied so far, the briber has to pay every voter some amount of money depending on what the briber wants the voter to report and the briber has some budget at her disposal. Although these models successfully capture many real world applications, in many other scenarios, the voters may be unwilling to deviate too much from their true preferences. In this paper, we study the computational complexity of the problem of finding a preference profile which is as close to the true preference profile as possible and still achieves the briber's goal subject to budget constraints. We call this problem Local Distance constrained $bribery. We consider three important measures of distances, namely, swap distance, footrule distance, and maximum displacement distance, and resolve the complexity of the optimal bribery problem for many common voting rules. We show that the problem is polynomial time solvable for the plurality and veto voting rules for all the three measures of distance. On the other hand, we prove that the problem is NP-complete for a class of scoring rules which includes the Borda voting rule, maximin, Copelandα for any α∈[0,1], and Bucklin voting rules for all the three measures of distance even when the distance allowed per voter is 1 for the swap and maximum displacement distances and 2 for the footrule distance even without the budget constraints (which corresponds to having an infinite budget). For the k-approval voting rule for any constant k>1 and the simplified Bucklin voting rule, we show that the problem is NP-complete for the swap distance even when the distance allowed is 2 and for the footrule distance even when the distance allowed is 4 even without the budget constraints. We complement these hardness results by showing that the problem for the k-approval and simplified Bucklin voting rules is polynomial time solvable for the swap distance if the distance allowed is 1 and for the footrule distance if the distance allowed is at most 3. For the k-approval voting rule for the maximum displacement distance for any constant k>1, and for the simplified Bucklin voting rule for the maximum displacement distance, we show that the problem is NP-complete (with the budget constraints) and, without the budget constraints, they are polynomial time solvable.

Measuring gender attitudes using list experiments

We elicit adolescent girls’ attitudes towards intimate partner violence and child marriage using purposefully collected data from rural Bangladesh. Alongside direct survey questions, we conduct list experiments to elicit true preferences for intimate partner violence and marriage before age 18. Responses to direct survey questions suggest that very few adolescent girls in the study accept the practises of intimate partner violence and child marriage (5% and 2%). However, our list experiments reveal significantly higher support for both intimate partner violence and child marriage (at 30% and 24%). We further investigate how numerous variables relate to preferences for egalitarian gender norms in rural Bangladesh.

A new data-driven mathematical model dissociates attractiveness from sexual dimorphism of human faces

Human facial attractiveness is evaluated by using multiple cues. Among others, sexual dimorphism (i.e. masculinity for male faces/femininity for female faces) is an influential factor of perceived attractiveness. Since facial attractiveness is judged by incorporating sexually dimorphic traits as well as other cues, it is theoretically possible to dissociate sexual dimorphism from facial attractiveness. This study tested this by using a data-driven mathematical modelling approach. We first analysed the correlation between perceived masculinity/femininity and attractiveness ratings for 400 computer-generated male and female faces (Experiment 1) and found positive correlations between perceived femininity and attractiveness for both male and female faces. Using these results, we manipulated a set of faces along the attractiveness dimension while controlling for sexual dimorphism by orthogonalisation with data-driven mathematical models (Experiment 2). Our results revealed that perceived attractiveness and sexual dimorphism are dissociable, suggesting that there are as yet unidentified facial cues other than sexual dimorphism that contribute to facial attractiveness. Future studies can investigate the true preference of sexual dimorphism or the genuine effects of attractiveness by using well-controlled facial stimuli like those that this study generated. The findings will be of benefit to the further understanding of what makes a face attractive.

Privacy-preserving polling

Can you answer a poll without revealing your true preferences and have the results of the poll still be accurate?

Modelling the expected probability of correct assignment under uncertainty

When making important decisions such as choosing health insurance or a school, people are often uncertain what levels of attributes will suit their true preference. After choice, they might realize that their uncertainty resulted in a mismatch: choosing a sub-optimal alternative, while another available alternative better matches their needs. We study here the overall impact, from a central planner’s perspective, of decisions under such uncertainty. We use the representation of Voronoi tessellations to locate all individuals and alternatives in an attribute space. We provide an expression for the probability of correct match, and calculate, analytically and numerically, the average percentage of matches. We test dependence on the level of uncertainty and location. We find that the overall mismatch is considerable even for low uncertainty—a possible concern for policy makers. We further explore a commonly used practice—allocating service representatives to assist individuals’ decisions. We show that within a given budget and uncertainty level, the effective allocation is for individuals who are close to the boundary between several Voronoi cells, but are not right on the boundary.

Framing electricity plan choices to enhance green energy usage: A choice experiment with panel data from Germany

This paper investigates the choices and accompanying biases consumers have when actively deciding between two alternative electricity plans. We follow the perspective that observed choices do not necessarily reflect true preferences over outcomes, but are affected by several behavioral tendencies or biases. Our experiment focusses on framing-effects as an important source for such observed behavior. The study is based on data from a large-scale survey experiment conducted in Germany (n = 3320). We implemented a choice experiment in two waves of the GESIS Panel and analyzed more than 16,000 binary decisions between a standard electricity plan and a supply plan based entirely on renewable energy resources. Across two waves, we manipulated the numerical information as to how the additional costs for buying a green energy plan are presented in the decision problem while keeping the monetary consequences identical between the two waves. We show that framing the consequences of a green electricity plan choice as a foregone saving yields higher rates of green choices than framing the choice of green plan as an additional expenditure. We discuss problems and merits related to the policy strategy of actively framing green energy options that extend beyond the German context.

Note on Birnbaum and Wan (2020): True and error model analysis is robust with respect to certain violations of the MARTER model

AbstractThe Markov True and Error (MARTER) model (Birnbaum & Wan, 2020) has three components: a risky decision making model with one or more parameters, a Markov model that describes stochastic variation of parameters over time, and a true and error (TE) model that describes probabilistic relations between true preferences and overt responses. In this study, we simulated data according to 57 generating models that either did or did not satisfy the assumptions of the True and Error fitting model, that either did or did not satisfy the error independence assumptions, that either did or did not satisfy transitivity, and that had various patterns of error rates. A key assumption in the TE fitting model is that a person’s true preferences do not change in the short time within a session; that is, preference reversals between two responses by the same person to two presentations of the same choice problem in the same brief session are due to random error. In a set of 48 simulations, data generating models either satisfied this assumption or they implemented a systematic violation, in which true preferences could change within sessions. We used the true and error (TE) fitting model to analyze the simulated data, and we found that it did a good job of distinguishing transitive from intransitive models and in estimating parameters not only when the generating model satisfied the model assumptions, but also when model assumptions were violated in this way. When the generating model violated the assumptions, statistical tests of the TE fitting models correctly detected the violations. Even when the data contained violations of the TE model, the parameter estimates representing probabilities of true preference patterns were surprisingly accurate, except for error rates, which were inflated by model violations. In a second set of simulations, the generating model either had error rates that were or were not independent of true preferences and transitivity either was or was not satisfied. It was found again that the TE analysis was able to detect the violations of the fitting model, and the analysis correctly identified whether the data had been generated by a transitive or intransitive process; however, in this case, estimated incidence of a preference pattern was reduced if that preference pattern had a higher error rate. Overall, the violations could be detected and did not affect the ability of the TE analysis to discriminate between transitive and intransitive processes.

Product Line Design with Quantal Consumer Preferences

This paper studies how a firm designs a product line that motivates consumers to deliberate to infer their preferences and buy the product that matches the perceived preferences by deliberation. Some consumers cannot determine their true preferences after deliberation and instead perceive a wrong preference as their own. The statistics describing the distribution of preference perception after deliberation are defined as quantal preferences. By considering the quantal preferences, the firm is only able to design a product line that makes sure the population of consumers with same true preference willingly and truthfully participate the purchasing activity. Our research shows that the equilibrium properties of a screening contract (product line in our context) have been essentially altered by the quantal preferences compared with corresponding properties in a standard screening contract. With quantal preferences, at equilibrium, firm sacrifices part of their profit to reimburse each group of consumers to participate the purchase. Quantal preferences introduce two new incentives into the product line: limiting surplus losses and driving consumer to deliberate the true preference as much as possible. Different incentives can interrelate, e.g. the incentive motivating consumers to truthfully determine their perceived preferences and hence sorting different populations of consumers by the perceived preferences interacting the incentive limiting surplus losses, where deliberation cost adjusts which incentive is stronger. With quantal preferences, high type product can attract low preference consumers. The quality of high type product can be negative. The profit of high type or low type product can be negative, and the surplus of high type or low product can be negative as well. If only one type of product can be produced, it can be the low type product.

Expressive voting, graded interests and participation

I assume that voters mark ballots exclusively to express their true preferences among parties, leaving aside any considerations about an election’s possible outcome. The paper then analyzes the resulting voting behavior.In particular, it studies how effective different voting systems such as plurality rule, approval voting, and range voting are in fostering high turnout rates of such expressive voters.

Poly-Specialty Application Practices of Medical Students Applying to Integrated Vascular Surgery Residency

It is not uncommon for medical students seeking surgical residencies to apply to and rank two or more surgical specialties. Level of interest in a specialty is consistently cited as one of the most important factors for program directors when evaluating applicants for 0+5 integrated vascular surgery (IVS) programs. The purpose of this study was to examine trends in poly-specialty application submission to IVS and poly-specialty ranking of IVS to determine the percentage of applicants to IVS residencies with vascular surgery as their true preference. Electronic Residency Application Service (ERAS) statistics for noninternational medical graduates from 2011 to 2017 were mined for trends in poly-specialty applications between IVS and other surgical disciplines. The poly-specialty application percentage, range, and standard deviation were determined. The National Resident Match Program (NRMP) results and data from 2011 to 2018 were also used to identify those U.S. seniors who ranked IVS programs as their preferred choice, defined as ranking vascular as the only choice or the first-choice specialty. This was compared with those who ranked a specialty other than vascular surgery first but had vascular surgery listed on their rank list. These data were also collected for applicants to orthopedic surgery, neurosurgery, otolaryngology, obstetrics and gynecology, integrated cardiothoracic surgery, and integrated plastic surgery. Between 2011 and 2017, applicants who submitted ERAS applications to IVS most often poly-specialty applied to IVS and general surgery (87%) followed by IVS and the following: preliminary surgery (71%), plastic surgery (22%), orthopedic surgery (19%), neurosurgery (17%), otolaryngology (16%), obstetrics and gynecology (12%), and urology (3%). The percentage of the applicant pool submitting rank lists with multiple specialties fell over the study period from 94% in 2011 to 67% in 2018. Between 2011 and 2018, an average of 14% of IVS applicants (n=463), who submitted rank lists to the NRMP, ranked a specialty other than vascular as their true preference (range 7-23 SD 5). Only integrated cardiothoracic surgery had a higher percentage of applicants listing a different specialty as their true preference at 25% (range 18-36 SD 7). Nearly all (97-99%) applicants to orthopedic surgery, neurosurgery, otolaryngology, obstetrics and gynecology, and plastic surgery applied to that specialty as their true preference. IVS residency applicants were most likely to apply for poly-specialty via the ERAS to general surgery and IVS. Compared to the other surgical specialties, those who submitted rank lists to the NRMP listing integrated cardiothoracic and IVS had the highest likelihood of ranking another specialty higher. Care must be taken when evaluating applications to IVS residencies to determine the applicant's level of interest in vascular surgery as a career.

On the equivalence of optimal recommendation sets and myopically optimal query sets

Preference elicitation is an important component in many AI applications, including decision support and recommender systems. Such systems must assess user preferences, based on interactions with their users, and make recommendations using (possibly incomplete and imprecise) beliefs about those preferences. Mechanisms for explicit preference elicitation—asking users to answer direct queries about their preferences—can be of great value; but due to the cognitive and time cost imposed on users, it is important to minimize the number of queries by asking those that have high (expected) value of information.An alternative approach is to simply make recommendations and have users provide feedback (e.g., accept a recommendation or critique it in some way) and use this more indirect feedback to gradually improve the quality of the recommendations. Due to inherent uncertainty about a user's true preferences, often a set of recommendations is presented to the user at each stage. Conceptually, a set of recommendations can also be viewed as choice query, in which the user indicates which option is most preferred from that set.Because of the potential tension between making a good set recommendation and asking an informative choice query, we explore the connection between the two. We consider two different models of preference uncertainty and optimization: (a) a Bayesian framework in which a posterior over user utility functions is maintained, optimal recommendations are assessed using expected utility, and queries are assessed using expected value of information; and (b) a minimax-regret framework in which user utility uncertainty is strict (represented by a polytope), recommendations are made using the minimax-regret robustness criterion, and queries are assessed using worst-case regret reduction. We show that, somewhat surprisingly, in both cases, there is no tradeoff to be made between good recommendations and good queries: we prove that the optimal recommendation set of size k is also an optimal choice query of size k. We also examine the case where user responses to choice queries are error prone (using both constant and mixed multinomial logit noise models) showing the results are robust to this form of noise.In both frameworks, our theoretical results have practical consequences for the design of interactive recommenders. Our results also allow us to design efficient algorithms to compute optimal query/recommendation sets. We develop several such algorithms (both exact and approximate) for both settings and provide empirical validation of their performance.

Mutual uncertainty and credible reassurance: experimental evidence

ABSTRACT Recent theoretical work has suggested that mutual uncertainty of a particular kind can promote credible reassurance and cooperation among states with compatible preferences. Specifically, on issues where cooperation is subjective, such that states are uncertain what types of actions the other will view as cooperative, credible reassurance under mutual uncertainty is straightforward. This finding, if correct, has profound implications for the scope and severity of the security dilemma, suggesting that misplaced suspicion due to uncertainty can be readily overcome under a range of realistic conditions. We present the results of a laboratory experiment testing this important theoretical claim, and find broad support for it. When cooperation is subjective, mutual uncertainty induces senders to signal their true preferences and allows receivers to form more accurate beliefs about the sender’s type. Importantly, however, mutual uncertainty did not increase receivers’ confidence in their assessments of the sender’s type. Thus, receivers responded appropriately as signals became more credible, but failed to recognize that their beliefs had become more accurate. This distinction between the accuracy and confidence of beliefs has broad implications for international relations theory and social science methodology.