Kopsacheilis Orestis
School of Economics, University of Nottingham, Sir Clive Granger Building, Nottingham, NG7 2RD UK.
Theory Decis. 2018;84(3):311-339. doi: 10.1007/s11238-017-9623-y. Epub 2017 Jul 6.
According to the 'Description-Experience gap' (DE gap), when people are provided with the descriptions of risky prospects they make choices as if they overweight the probability of rare events; but when making decisions from experience after exploring the prospects' properties, they behave as if they underweight such probability. This study revisits this discrepancy while focusing on information-search in decisions from experience. We report findings from a lab-experiment with three treatments: a standard version of decisions from description and two versions of decisions from experience: with and without a 'history table' recording previously sampled events. We find that people sample more from lotteries with rarer events. The history table proved influential; in its absence search is more responsive to cues such as a lottery's variance while in its presence the cue that stands out is the table's maximum capacity. Our analysis of risky choices captures a significant DE gap which is mitigated by the presence of the history table. We elicit probability weighting functions at the individual level and report that subjects overweight rare events in experience but less so than in description. Finally, we report a measure that allows us to compare the type of DE gap found in studies using choice patterns with that inferred through valuation and find that the phenomenon is similar but not identical across the two methods.
根据“描述 - 经验差距”（DE差距），当向人们提供风险前景的描述时，他们做出选择的方式似乎是高估了罕见事件的概率；但当在探索前景属性后根据经验做出决策时，他们的行为方式似乎是低估了此类概率。本研究重新审视了这一差异，同时聚焦于基于经验的决策中的信息搜索。我们报告了一项实验室实验的结果，该实验有三种处理方式：标准的基于描述的决策版本以及两种基于经验的决策版本：一种有记录先前抽样事件的“历史表”，另一种没有。我们发现人们从包含更罕见事件的彩票中抽样更多。历史表被证明具有影响力；在没有历史表的情况下，搜索对诸如彩票方差等线索更敏感，而在有历史表的情况下，突出的线索是表的最大容量。我们对风险选择的分析捕捉到了显著的DE差距，而历史表的存在减轻了这一差距。我们在个体层面引出概率加权函数，并报告说受试者在基于经验的决策中高估罕见事件，但程度低于基于描述的决策。最后，我们报告了一种度量方法，使我们能够将使用选择模式的研究中发现的DE差距类型与通过估值推断出的DE差距类型进行比较，并发现这两种方法所发现的现象相似但不完全相同。
