Decision making in environments with non-independent dimensions, experimental data

Bhatia, Sudeep (2017). Decision making in environments with non-independent dimensions, experimental data. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-852830

This network project brings together economists, psychologists, computer and complexity scientists from three leading centres for behavioural social science at Nottingham, Warwick and UEA. This group will lead a research programme with two broad objectives: to develop and test cross-disciplinary models of human behaviour and behaviour change; to draw out their implications for the formulation and evaluation of public policy.
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Data description (abstract)

This paper tests whether the dimensions involved in preferential choice tasks are evaluated independently from one another. Common decision heuristics satisfy dimensional independence, and multi-strategy models that assume that decision makers use a repertoire of these heuristics predict that they are unable to represent and respond to dimensional dependencies in the decision environment. In contrast, some single-strategy models are able to violate dimensional independence, and subsequently adapt to environments that feature interacting dimensions. Across five experiments, this paper documents systematic violations of the assumption of dimensional independence. This suggests that decision makers are able to modify their behavior to respond to dimensional dependencies in their environment, and in turn those models that are unable to do this do not provide a full account of human strategy selection and behavior change. This paper ends with a discussion of ways in which some existing models can be modified to incorporate violations of dimensional independence.

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