Debiasing context effects in strategic decisions: Playing against a consistent opponent can correct perceptual but not reinforcement biases
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2008, Vol 3, Issue 6
Abstract
Vlaev and Chater (2006) demonstrated that the cooperativeness of previously seen prisoner’s dilemma games biases choices and predictions in the current game. These effects were: a) assimilation to the mean cooperativeness of the played games caused by action reinforcement, and b) perceptual contrast with the preceding games depending on the range and the rank order of their cooperativeness. We demonstrate that, when playing against choice strategies that are not biased by such factors, perceptual biases disappear and only assimilation bias caused by reinforcement persists. This suggests that reinforcement learning is a powerful source of inconsistency in strategic interaction, which may not be eliminated even if the other players are unbiased and the markets are efficient.
Authors and Affiliations
Ivo Vlaev, and Nick Chater
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP677647
- DOI -
- Views 164
- Downloads 0
Correlations of cognitive reflection with judgments and choices
We investigated the role of individual differences in cognitive reflection in decision making. We measured the performance of 157 participants in the cognitive reflection test (Frederick, 2005) and a number of decision-m...
New findings on unconscious versus conscious thought in decision making: additional empirical data and meta-analysis.
Ninety-eight Australian students participated in a functional replication of a study published by Dijksterhuis et al. (2006). The results indicated that unconscious thought does not necessarily lead to better normative d...
An exploratory investigation of the impact of evaluation context on ambiguity aversion
This paper explores how context influences the evaluation of risky and ambiguous bets in the classic two-colour Ellsberg task. In three experiments context was manipulated via the presence/absence of additional bets agai...
The opportunity-threat theory of decision-making under risk
A new theory of decision-making under risk, the Opportunity-Threat Theory is proposed. Analysis of risk into opportunity and threat components allows description of behavior as a combination of opportunity seeking and th...
Type of army service and decision to engage in risky behavior among young people in Israel
Previous studies have examined the impact of military service on the decision to engage in risky behavior. Yet most of these studies focused on voluntary recruits, did not distinguish between legal and illegal risky acti...