True-and-error models violate independence and yet they are testable
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2013, Vol 8, Issue 6
Abstract
Birnbaum (2011) criticized tests of transitivity that are based entirely on binary choice proportions. When assumptions of independence and stationarity (iid) of choice responses are violated, choice proportions could lead to wrong conclusions. Birnbaum (2012a) proposed two statistics (correlation and variance of preference reversals) to test iid, using random permutations to simulate p-values. Cha, Choi, Guo, Regenwetter, and Zwilling (2013) defended methods based on marginal proportions but conceded that such methods wrongly diagnose hypothetical examples of Birnbaum (2012a). However, they also claimed that “true and error” models also satisfy independence and also fail in such cases unless they become untestable. This article presents correct true-and-error models; it shows how these models violate iid, how they might correctly identify cases that would be misdiagnosed by marginal proportions, and how they can be tested and rejected. This note also refutes other arguments of Cha et al. (2013), including contentions that other tests failed to violate iid “with flying colors”, that violations of iid “do not replicate”, that type I errors are not appropriately estimated by the permutation method, and that independence assumptions are not critical to interpretation of marginal choice proportions.
Authors and Affiliations
Michael H. Birnbaum
A Domain-Specific Risk-Taking (DOSPERT) scale for adult populations
This paper proposes a revised version of the original Domain-Specific Risk-Taking (DOSPERT) scale developed by Weber, Blais, and Betz (2002) that is shorter and applicable to a {broader range of ages, cultures, and educa...
Do we de-bias ourselves?: The impact of repeated presentation on the bat-and-ball problem
The notorious bat-and-ball problem has long been used to demonstrate that people are easily biased by their intuitions. In this paper we test the robustness of biased responding by examining how it is affected by repeate...
Maximizers versus satisficers: Decision-making styles, competence, and outcomes
Our previous research suggests that people reporting a stronger desire to maximize obtain worse life outcomes (Bruine de Bruin et al., 2007). Here, we examine whether this finding may be explained by the decision-making...
Cultural differences in responses to real-life and hypothetical trolley problems
Trolley problems have been used in the development of moral theory and the psychological study of moral judgments and behavior. Most of this research has focused on people from the West, with implicit assumptions that mo...
The attraction effect in motor planning decisions
In motor lotteries the probability of success is inherent in a person’s ability to make a speeded pointing movement. By contrast, in traditional economic lotteries, the probability of success is explicitly stated. Decisi...