scholarly journals Decisions from Experience and the Effect of Rare Events in Risky Choice

2004 ◽  
Vol 15 (8) ◽  
pp. 534-539 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph Hertwig ◽  
Greg Barron ◽  
Elke U. Weber ◽  
Ido Erev
Author(s):  
Ralph Hertwig ◽  
Gregory M. Barron ◽  
Elke U. Weber ◽  
Ido Erev

2017 ◽  
Vol 70 (10) ◽  
pp. 2048-2059 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher R. Madan ◽  
Elliot A. Ludvig ◽  
Marcia L. Spetch

People's risk preferences differ for choices based on described probabilities versus those based on information learned through experience. For decisions from description, people are typically more risk averse for gains than for losses. In contrast, for decisions from experience, people are sometimes more risk seeking for gains than losses, especially for choices with the possibility of extreme outcomes (big wins or big losses), which are systematically overweighed in memory. Using a within-subject design, this study evaluated whether this memory bias plays a role in the differences in risky choice between description and experience. As in previous studies, people were more risk seeking for losses than for gains in description but showed the opposite pattern in experience. People also more readily remembered the extreme outcomes and judged them as having occurred more frequently. These memory biases correlated with risk preferences in decisions from experience but not in decisions from description. These results suggest that systematic memory biases may be responsible for some of the differences in risk preference across description and experience.


Author(s):  
Ralph Hertwig ◽  
Greg Barron ◽  
Elke E. Weber ◽  
Ido Erev

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher R Madan ◽  
Elliot Andrew Ludvig ◽  
Marcia L Spetch

Both humans and non-human animals regularly encounter decisions involving risk and uncertainty. This paper provides an overview of our research program examining risky decisions in which the odds and outcomes are learned through experience in people and pigeons. We summarize the results of 15 experiments across 8 publications, with a total of over 1300 participants. We highlight 4 key findings from this research: (1) people choose differently when the odds and outcomes are learned through experience compared to when they are described; (2) when making decisions from experience, people overweight values at or near the ends of the distribution of experienced values (i.e., the best and the worst, termed the “extreme-outcome rule”), which leads to more risk seeking for relative gains than for relative losses; (3) people show biases in self-reported memory whereby they are more likely to report an extreme outcome than an equally-often experienced non-extreme outcome, and they judge these extreme outcomes as having occurred more often; and (4) under certain circumstances pigeons show similar patterns of risky choice as humans, but the underlying processes may not be identical. This line of research has stimulated other research in the field of judgement and decision making, illustrating how investigations from a comparative perspective can lead in surprising directions.


2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Pisklak ◽  
Elliot Ludvig ◽  
Christopher Madan ◽  
Marcia Spetch
Keyword(s):  

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elke U. Weber ◽  
Anna C. van Duijvenvoorde ◽  
Leah H. Somerville ◽  
Alisa Powers ◽  
Wouter D. Weeda ◽  
...  

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