Peter Mohr, Junior Professor and head of the Dahlem International Junior Research Group „Neuroeconomics” at the Freie Universitaet Berlin, will be visiting us this Thursday and giving a talk in the Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology Colloquium (abstract follows).

Context Effects in Risky Choices

Context effects are defined as preference changes, depending on the set of available options. The mechanisms that lead to their emergence are, however, still under debate. Unlike utility-based models of choice, more sophisticated evidence accumulation frameworks like Multialternative Decision Field Theory (MDFT) are generally able to account for these effects. In a first experiment, we show that one specific context effect, namely the attraction effect, is present in risky choices and can be explained by MDFT. In a second experiment we extend these findings by showing, that another context effect, namely the compromise effect, is also present in risky choices. Similarly to the first experiment, MDFT is able to explain both context effects in risky choices. Recently, however, visual attention has been ascribed a more constructive and active role in preference formation, leading to the development of attention-based models of choice. Eye-tracking data in our second experiment suggests a strong relation between choice and visual attention, replicating the so-called gaze cascade effect and demonstrating both context effects also in visual attention. Finally, the inclusion of visual attention into existing models of choice substantially increased their ability to explain context effects in risky choices.