Many important decisions are made under stress and they often involve risky alternatives. There has been ample evidence that stress influences decision making in cognitive as well as in affective domains, but still very little is known about whether individual attitudes to risk change with...

We investigate how stable individuals’ risk attitudes are with respect to changes in cognitive load. In a laboratory experiment using pairwise lottery choice and a within-subject design, we showthat putting subjects under load via a concurrent working-memory task significantly increases their...

This paper discusses solutions derived from lottery experiments using two alternative assumptions: that people perceive wealth changes as absolute amounts of money; and that people consider wealth changes as a proportion of some reference value dependant on the context of the problem under...

This paper presents a review of adaptation concepts at the evolutionary, environmental, neural, sensory, mental and mathematical levels, including Helson's and Parducci's theories of perception and category judgments. Two kinds of adaptation can be clearly distinguished. The first, known as...

Researchers describing the discovery of something they are not equipped to fully understand run the risk that their reach will exceed their grasp. And so, as mere enthusiastic newcomers to the study of author Rex Stout, we will limit ourselves to: (1) reporting that we have run across an early...

A probability weighting function w(p) for an objective probability p in decision under risk plays a pivotal role in Kahneman-Tversky's prospect theory. Although recent studies in econophysics and neuroeconomics widely utilized probability weighting functions, psychophysical foundations of the...

For more than a century, careful readers of the Green Bag have known that “[t]here is nothing sacred in a theory of law...which has outlived its usefulness or which was radically wrong from the beginning...The question is What is the law and what is the true public policy?” Professor Orin...

This short paper demonstrates that the claim of Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT) that people are risk seeking for loss prospects appears to be merely a result of using a specific form of the probability weighting function to estimate the power factor of the value function. Using experimental...

This short paper shows that the Allais Paradox and the Common Ratio Effect - regarded as classic examples of the violation of the Expected Utility Theory Axioms - may be easily explained by assuming that changes in wealth (i.e. gains and losses) are perceived in relative terms. The preference...

Revealed preference is the dominant approach for inferring preferences, but it relies on discrete, stochastic choices. The choice process also produces response times (RTs) which are continuous and can often be observed in the absence of informative choice outcomes. Moreover, there is a...