We have Jana Jarecki, Center for Economic Psychology, University of Basel, giving a talk in the Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology Colloquium this Thursday (13:00; title and abstract follow)!

Exemplar-based processes for preferential choices

Most work on preferential choices assumes that people evaluate choice options by a weighting-and-adding of subjective values of the attributes of that option. Such linear models are widely used in consumer research and usually they account well for human choice data. We here propose a different process: people evaluate choice options based on comparisons with their previous experiences. Accordingly, preferences result from the similarity between a present option and previously experienced positively or negatively evaluated objects, resembling ideas of exemplar-based inferential judgment and categorization processes. Using cognitive modeling and computer simulations we identified a preference-learning task to optimally contrast the standard linear-weighting and the similarity-based view on preferences. Predicting the preferential choices of 33 participants in the resulting four-attribute unsupervised preference learning task showed that, for 20 of 33 participants, the out-of-sample predictions made by the exemplar-similarity-based preference model outperformed the linear-weighting model. These results show how individuals’ past experiences in a preferential domain can strongly impact preferential decisions in the future.