Working Paper

Axiom Preferences and Choice Mistakes under Risk

Fabian Herweg, Svenja Hippel, Daniel Müller, Fabio Römeis
CESifo, Munich, 2024

CESifo Working Paper No. 11166

We investigate whether violations of canonical axioms of choice under risk are mistakes or a manifestation of true preferences. First, we elicit axiom and gamble preferences and then allow subjects to revise their potentially conflicting preferences. Among the behavioral patterns that allow for a clear-cut interpretation on the decision level, we find that roughly 70% of axiom viola-tions are intentional whereas only 30% are mistakes. On the subject level we can clearly categorize almost half of our subjects. Among those, roughly 24%are rational expected utility maximizers, 24% make occasional mistakes, and 52% refute the normative value of these axioms.

CESifo Category
Empirical and Theoretical Methods
Behavioural Economics
Keywords: axiomatic rationality, choice under risk, context-dependent preferences, mistakes, regret theory
JEL Classification: C910, D010, D810, D910