Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL 61820, USA.
Psychol Rev. 2012 Apr;119(2):408-16. doi: 10.1037/a0027372.
Theories of rational choice often make the structural consistency assumption that every decision maker's binary strict preference among choice alternatives forms a strict weak order. Likewise, the very concept of a utility function over lotteries in normative, prescriptive, and descriptive theory is mathematically equivalent to strict weak order preferences over those lotteries, while intransitive heuristic models violate such weak orders. Using new quantitative interdisciplinary methodologies, we dissociate the variability of choices from the structural inconsistency of preferences. We show that laboratory choice behavior among stimuli of a classical "intransitivity" paradigm is, in fact, consistent with variable strict weak order preferences. We find that decision makers act in accordance with a restrictive mathematical model that, for the behavioral sciences, is extraordinarily parsimonious. Our findings suggest that the best place to invest future behavioral decision research is not in the development of new intransitive decision models but rather in the specification of parsimonious models consistent with strict weak order(s), as well as heuristics and other process models that explain why preferences appear to be weakly ordered.
理性选择理论通常做出结构一致性假设，即每个决策者在选择方案之间的二元严格偏好构成严格弱序。同样，规范、规定和描述性理论中关于彩票的效用函数的概念在数学上等同于对那些彩票的严格弱序偏好，而不可传递启发式模型违反了这种弱序。我们使用新的定量跨学科方法，将选择的可变性与偏好的结构不一致性分开。我们表明，在经典的“不可传递性”范式中，刺激物之间的实验室选择行为实际上与可变性严格弱序偏好一致。我们发现决策者的行为符合一种限制性的数学模型，对于行为科学来说，这种模型非常简约。我们的研究结果表明，未来行为决策研究的最佳投资地点不是开发新的不可传递决策模型，而是制定与严格弱序一致的简约模型，以及解释为什么偏好似乎是弱有序的启发式和其他过程模型。
