Arkady Konovalov, from the University of Zürich, visits Basel this week to give a talk in the Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology Colloquium (Thursday 26 April).

Response time as strategic choice

We often use choices, which are typically discrete, to infer preferences. The choice process also produces response times (RTs), which are continuous and often can be easily observed. Using three choice tasks, we demonstrate that RTs, which typically peak at indifference, can supplement choices to infer individual preferences, and can be used to recover individual utility functions in the absence of choice data. This begs the question of whether individuals can exploit this information. In a bargaining experiment, we find that buyers tend to quickly reject unreasonably high prices but take more time to respond to offers that are close to their valuation. This allows sellers to infer buyers’ values from observable RTs, creating an incentive for buyers to manipulate their RT, which they do.