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4Gender Differences in Performance Predictions: Evidence from the Cognitive Reflection TestFrontier in Psychology 2016 217287. 2016.This paper studies performance predictions in the 7-item Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) and whether they differ by gender. After participants completed the CRT, they predicted their own (i), the other participants' (ii), men's (iii), and women's (iv) number of correct answers. In keeping with existing literature, men scored higher on the CRT than women and both men and women were too optimistic about their own performance. When we compare gender-specific predictions, we observe that men think t…Read more
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12Violations of coalescing in parametric utility measurementTheory and Decision 89 (4): 471-501. 2020.The majority consensus in the empirical literature is that probability weighting functions are typically inverse-S shaped, that is, people tend to overweight small and underweight large probabilities. A separate stream of literature has reported event-splitting effects and shown that they can explain violations of expected utility. This leads to the questions whether the observed shape of weighting functions is a mere consequence of the coalesced presentation and, more generally, whether prefere…Read more
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30Income inequality and risk taking: the impact of social comparison informationTheory and Decision 87 (3): 283-297. 2019.In contrast to the assumptions of standard economic theory, recent experimental evidence shows that the income of peers has a systematic impact on observed degrees of risk aversion. This paper reports the findings of two experiments examining the impact of income inequality on risk preferences and whether the knowledge of inequality mediates the decisions. In Experiment 1, participants who were recruited for a real-effort task were paid either a low wage or a high wage. Half of the participants …Read more
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5Gender differences in ambiguity aversion under different outcome correlation structuresTheory and Decision 82 (2): 211-219. 2017.This paper studies the impact of different outcome correlation structures on gender differences in ambiguity aversion. We conducted an investment game with two separate treatments. In the uncorrelated treatment, the outcomes of the investment game were determined individually. In the correlated treatment, the outcomes of the investment game were determined collectively within a reference group. From an evolutionary perspective, men should be more concerned about relative outcomes, because their …Read more
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51Consciousness and the Existence of God: A Theistic Argument, by J. P. Moreland (review)Faith and Philosophy 30 (1): 117-122. 2013.
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43Reconsidering the common ratio effect: the roles of compound independence, reduction, and coalescingTheory and Decision 77 (3): 323-339. 2014.Common ratio effects should be ruled out if subjects’ preferences satisfy compound independence, reduction of compound lotteries, and coalescing. In other words, at least one of these axioms should be violated in order to generate a common ratio effect. Relying on a simple experiment, we investigate which failure of these axioms is concomitant with the empirical observation of common ratio effects. We observe that compound independence and reduction of compound lotteries hold, whereas coalescing…Read more
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29An Examination of C. Stephen Evans’s “Natural Signs and Knowledge of God: A New Look at Theistic Arguments”Philosophy and Theology 26 (1): 151-185. 2014.In his excellent book Natural Signs and Knowledge of God: A New Look at Theistic Arguments, C. Stephen Evans argues that what underlies the classical theistic arguments are theistic natural signs. The awareness of our own contingency underlies the cosmological argument, beneficial order underlies the teleological argument, our experience of feeling moral obligations underlies the moral argument, and the intrinsic value of human beings underlies the axiological argument. Natural signs point to an…Read more
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48Common consequence effects in pricing and choiceTheory and Decision 76 (1): 1-7. 2014.This paper presents an experimental study of common consequence effects in binary choice, willingness-to-pay elicitation, and willingness-to-accept elicitation. We find strong evidence in favor of the fanning out hypothesis for both WTP and WTA. In contrast, the choice data do not show a clear pattern of violations in the absence of certainty effects. Our results underline the relevance of differences between pricing and choice tasks, and their implications for models of decision making under ri…Read more
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73Testing transitivity in choice under riskTheory and Decision 69 (4): 599-614. 2010.Recently proposed models of risky choice imply systematic violations of transitivity of preference. This study explored whether people show the predicted intransitivity of the two models proposed to account for the certainty effect in Allais paradoxes. In order to distinguish “true” violations from those produced by “error,” a model was fit in which each choice can have a different error rate and each person can have a different pattern of preferences that need not be transitive. Error rate for …Read more
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70An Examination of Michael J. Almedia’s “The Metaphysics of Perfect Beings”Philo 15 (1): 38-54. 2012.A perfect being is a being which possesses all perfections essentially. A perfect being is essentially omniscient, essentially omnipotent, essentially perfectly good, and necessarily existing. In his excellent book “The Metaphysics of Perfect Beings” Michael J. Almeida investigates the following tough questions about perfect beings: What would a perfect being create? Which moral requirements would a perfect being (have to) fulfill when deciding what to create? Is there a minimum or a maximum amo…Read more
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1366Charles Taliaferro, Dialogues about GodEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 6 (4): 199--205. 2014.
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14Applications of Non-Expected UtilityIn Paul Anand, Prasanta Pattanaik & Clemens Puppe (eds.), Handbook of Rational and Social Choice, Oxford University Press. 2009.
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110Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies. Science, Religion, and NaturalismMetaphysica 13 (2): 229-236. 2012.
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78Lottery Dependent Utility: a ReexaminationTheory and Decision 50 (1): 35-58. 2001.In order to accommodate empirically observed violations of the independence axiom of expected utility theory Becker and Sarin (1987) proposed their model of lottery dependent utility in which the utility of an outcome may depend on the lottery being evaluated. Although this dependence is intuitively very appealing and provides a simple functional form of the resulting decision criterion, lottery dependent utility has been nearly completely neglected in the recent literature on decision making un…Read more
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77An Experimental Investigation of the Disparity Between WTA and WTP for LotteriesTheory and Decision 66 (3): 229-262. 2009.In this paper we experimentally investigate the disparity between willingness-to-accept (WTA) and willingness-to-pay (WTP) for risky lotteries. The direction of the income effect is reversed by endowing subjects with the highest price of a lottery when asking the WTP question. Our results show that the income effect is too small to be the only source of the disparity. Since the disparity concentrates on a subsample of subjects, parametric and nonparametric tests of the WTA-WTP ratio may lead to …Read more