A statistical test of independence in choice data with small samples
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2012, Vol 7, Issue 1
Abstract
This paper develops tests of independence and stationarity in choice data collected with small samples. The method builds on the approach of Smith and Batchelder (2008). The technique is intended to distinguish cases where a person is systematically changing “true” preferences (from one group of trials to another) from cases in which a person is following a random preference mixture model with independently and identically distributed sampling in each trial. Preference reversals are counted between all pairs of repetitions. The variance of these preference reversals between all pairs of repetitions is then calculated. The distribution of this statistic is simulated by a Monte Carlo procedure in which the data are randomly permuted and the statistic is recalculated in each simulated sample. A second test computes the correlation between the mean number of preference reversals and the difference between replicates, which is also simulated by Monte Carlo. Data of Regenwetter, Dana, and Davis-Stober (2011) are reanalyzed by this method. Eight of 18 subjects showed significant deviations from the independence assumptions by one or both of these tests, which is significantly more than expected by chance.
Authors and Affiliations
Michael H. Birnbaum
The effect of incentive structure on search in the secretary problem
We tested the effectiveness of performance-based incentive structures using three incentive structures — commission base, best only and flat fee — and two levels of context — no context and house-selling — in an experime...
Intuition and affect in risk perception and decision making
gisela.boehm@psysp.uib.no
Moral pluralism on the trolley tracks: Different normative principles are used for different reasons in justifying moral judgments
The psychological correlates of utilitarian choices in sacrificial moral dilemmas are contentious. In the literature, some research (Greene, et al., 2001) suggested that utilitarianism requires analytic thinking while ot...
Time preference and its relationship with age, health, and survival probability
Although theories from economics and evolutionary biology predict that one’s age, health, and survival probability should be associated with one’s subjective discount rate (SDR), few studies have empirically tested for t...
An alternative approach for eliciting willingness-to-pay: A randomized Internet trial
Open-ended methods that elicit willingness-to-pay (WTP) in terms of absolute dollars often result in high rates of questionable and highly skewed responses, insensitivity to changes in health state, and raise an ethical...