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An empirical test of the role of value certainty in decision making

View ORCID ProfileDouglas Lee, Giorgio Coricelli
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.06.16.155234
Douglas Lee
1University of Southern California, Department of Economics
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  • For correspondence: DouglasGLee@gmail.com
Giorgio Coricelli
1University of Southern California, Department of Economics
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Abstract

Most contemporary models of value-based decisions are built on value estimates that are typically self-reported by the decision maker. Such models have been successful in accounting for choice accuracy and response time, and more recently choice confidence. The fundamental driver of such models is choice difficulty, which is almost always defined as the absolute value difference between the subjective value ratings of the options in a choice set. Yet a decision maker is not necessarily able to provide a value estimate with the same degree of certainty for each option that he encounters. We propose that choice difficulty is determined not only by absolute value distance of choice options, but also by their value certainty. In this study, we first demonstrate the reliability of the concept of an option-specific value certainty using three different experimental measures. We then demonstrate the influence that value certainty has on choice, including accuracy (consistency), choice confidence, response time, and choice-induced preference change (i.e., the degree to which value estimates change from pre- to post-choice evaluation). We conclude with a suggestion of how popular contemporary models of choice (e.g., race model, drift-diffusion model) could be improved by including option-specific value certainty as one of their inputs.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission.
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Posted August 19, 2020.
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An empirical test of the role of value certainty in decision making
Douglas Lee, Giorgio Coricelli
bioRxiv 2020.06.16.155234; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.06.16.155234
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An empirical test of the role of value certainty in decision making
Douglas Lee, Giorgio Coricelli
bioRxiv 2020.06.16.155234; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.06.16.155234

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