This paper reports on an experimental test of the Principle of Optimality in dynamic decision problems. This Principle, which states that the decision-maker should always choose the optimal decision at each stage of the decision problem, conditional on behaving optimally thereafter, underlies...

Two recent papers, Harless and Camerer (1994) and Hey and Orme (1994), are both addressed to the same question: which is the `best' theory of decision making under risk? As an essential part of their separate approaches to an answer to this question, both sets of authors had to make an...