Hunger Effects on Option Quality for Hedonic and Utilitarian Food Products

Multiple studies have examined the extent to which consumers’ hunger levels predict their food choices and preference patterns. These investigations often involve making binary choices between hedonic and utilitarian foods. However, most consumers entering a grocery store are not restricted to solely selecting either hedonic or utilitarian foods. Rather, they typically choose both hedonic and utilitarian food options. Moreover, little is known about the effects of hunger on the quality of these food choices or consumers’ cognitive performance in food contexts. To address these gaps, the current study explored (1) whether experimentally induced hunger (vs. satiation) influenced the option quality of consumers’ chosen food items (i.e., the match between actual choices and stated preferences); (2) whether this potential interplay was contingent on the food category (hedonic vs. utilitarian); and (3) whether hungry (vs. satiated) consumers’ performance differed on cognitively challenging tasks. The results revealed that hunger did not lead to a generalized decrease in consumers’ option quality. However, option quality was inferior for utilitarian—but not hedonic—foods among hungry participants, whereas no such differences were found for satiated participants. Hungry (vs. satiated) consumers also performed significantly worse on cognitively demanding tasks, underscoring the far-reaching consequences of hunger on consumers’ decision-making. Together, the current research offers a novel way of testing whether and how hunger influences the quality of consumers’ chosen food items in both hedonic and utilitarian food categories.

A Bayesian Modelling Approach to Examine the Role of Testosterone Administration on the Endowment Effect and Risk-Taking

We investigated the effects of testosterone administration on aspects of decision-making within the Prospect Theory framework. Using bayesian modeling, we assessed risk-taking under framing and Endowment Effect (effect of possession). We administered 100mg testosterone to forty men in a double-blind placebo-controlled fully-randomized cross-over experiment where they participated in two tasks. One was a risktaking task with binary choices under positive and negative framing with different probabilities. In a second task, participants had to bid for for two categories of items, hedonic and utilitarian. We observed a significant increase in serum testosterone concentrations after transdermal application. Compared to placebo, testosterone administration increased risk-taking under the positive framing and decreased under the negative framing. The sensitivity to gain was positive in each framing. Our model showed that decision-making is jointly influenced by testosterone and the trade-off between gains and losses. Moreover, while the endowment effect was more pronounced for hedonic than for utilitarian items, the effect was independent of testosterone. The findings provide novel information for the complex modulatory role of testosterone on risk-taking. The proposed models of effects of individual differences in testosterone on risk-taking could be used as predictive models.

Transitive Mate Preferences

Rational mate choices are central to individual happiness and collective social goods. Yet, few studies assess mate choice rationality from the decision-theoretic perspective. Here we present an experimental test of rationality in human mate preferences through the lens of transitivity, a fundamental hallmark of rational decision-making. In the experiment, participants made repeated binary choices between pairs of potential romantic partners in both short-term and long-term mating contexts. We tested the transitivity of mate preferences by systematically comparing four prominent transitive models with four models that allow for intransitive preferences on the choice data. Overall, all transitive models provided better accounts than the intransitive models in Bayesian model selection and strong stochastic transitivity (SST), the most restrictive transitive model, outperformed other transitive models. On the individual level, participants rarely displayed intransitive cycles and most of them were best described by transitive models in Bayesian model selection. Our paper presents a systematic evaluation of transitivity in mate preferences and sheds new light on our understanding of human mating behavior.

Evidence Accumulates for Individual Attributes during Value-Based Decisions

When choosing between different options, we tend to consider specific attribute qualities rather than deliberating over some general sense of the objects' overall values. The importance of each attribute together with its quality will determine our preference rankings over the available alternatives. Here, we show that the relative importance of the latent attributes within food rewards reliably differs when the items are evaluated in isolation compared to when binary choices are made between them. Specifically, we used standard regression and sequential sampling models to examine six datasets in which participants evaluated, and chose between, multi-attribute snack foods. We show that models that assume that attribute importance remains constant across evaluation and choice contexts fail to reproduce fundamental patterns in the choice data and provide quantitatively worse fits to the choice outcomes, response times, and confidence reports compared to models that allow for attribute importance to vary across preference elicitation methods. Our results provide important evidence that incorporating attribute-level information into computational models helps us to better understand the cognitive processes involved in value-based decision-making.

Can Market Participants Report Their Preferences Accurately (Enough)?

In mechanism design theory it is common to assume that agents can perfectly report their preferences, even in complex settings in which this assumption strains reality. We experimentally test whether real market participants can report their real preferences for course schedules “accurately enough” for a novel course allocation mechanism, approximate competitive equilibrium from equal incomes (A-CEEI), to realize its theoretical benefits. To use market participants’ real preferences (i.e., rather than artificial “induced preferences” as is typical in market design experiments), we develop a new experimental method. Our method, the “elicited preferences” approach, generates preference data from subjects through a series of binary choices. These binary choices reveal that subjects prefer their schedules constructed under A-CEEI to their schedules constructed under the incumbent mechanism, a bidding points auction, and that A-CEEI reduces envy, suggesting subjects are able to report their preferences accurately enough to realize the efficiency and fairness benefits of A-CEEI. However, preference-reporting mistakes do meaningfully harm mechanism performance. One identifiable pattern of mistakes was that subjects had relatively more difficulty reporting cardinal as opposed to ordinal preference information. The experiment helped to persuade the Wharton School to adopt the new mechanism and helped guide aspects of its practical implementation, especially around preference reporting. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, decision analysis.

The cognitive and behavioral effects of D-amphetamine and nicotine sensitization in adult zebrafish

Background Zebrafish are growing in use as a model for understanding drug dependence and addiction. Sensitization paradigms have been a useful tool in identifying mechanisms involved in drug-induced behavioral and neurological changes, but in zebrafish have tended to focus on locomotor, rather than cognitive, endpoints. Methods Here, we used a novel method, the FMP Y-maze, which measures continuous performance through a series of repeated binary choices (L vs R), to establish a model for assessing parameters associated with psychostimulant-induced behavioral and cognitive sensitization in adult zebrafish. Results Repeat, intermittent exposure to d-amphetamine (AMPH) for 14 days increased alternations (LRLR) in the maze, suggesting improved working memory, which was enhanced further following drug challenge after a short withdrawal period, suggesting behavioral sensitization. However, this cognitive enhancement coincided with a reduction in the use of other exploration strategies, hypolocomotion, and inhibition of cognitive flexibility. Like AMPH, exposure to nicotine (NIC) increased alternations following drug challenge after chronic treatment. Repeat NIC exposure appeared to induce both cognitive and psychomotor sensitization, as evidenced by increased working memory performance (alternations) and locomotor activity, without negatively impacting other search strategies or cognitive flexibility. Conclusion Chronic treatment with AMPH or NIC boosts cognitive performance in adult zebrafish. Cognitive sensitization occurred with both drugs, resulting in enhanced working memory; however, repeat AMPH exposure, following a withdrawal period, resulted in inhibited cognitive flexibility, an effect not evident with repeat NIC exposure. Cognitive and behavioral sensitization paradigms in zebrafish could serve as a useful tool for assessing cognitive states which result in cognitive enhancing or impairing effects of drugs.

The unpredictable Buridan's ass: Failure to predict decisions in a trivial decision-making task

In order to better examine seemingly unpredictable variation that appears in decision-making studies, I had people chose between two options that had no features or consequences to distinguish them. 100 users of Mechanical Turk completed 200 binary choices, and I examined the accuracy with which statistical models could predict the choices. Across three different conceptualizations of the prediction problem and a variety of models ranging from logistic regression to neural networks, I obtained at best modest predictive accuracy. Predicting trivial choices may actually be more difficult than predicting meaningful choices. These strongly negative results appear to place limits on the predictability of human behavior.

Alternations of classificatory verb stems in Tłı̨chǫ Yatıì: a cognitive semantic account

This paper investigates the phenomenon of ‘classificatory verbs’, i.e. a set of motion and positional verbs that show stem alternations depending on the semantic features of one of their arguments in Tłı̨chǫ Yatıì (Dogrib), based on field notes and documentary sources of the language. The paper shows that Tłı̨chǫ classificatory verbal categories belong to four semantic subclasses which have inconsistent stem inventories caused by the presence or absence of some semantic features. Stem inventories of locative verb systems vary depending on the scalar [effort] feature, and those of motion verbs correlate with the scalar [agentive] feature. The paper explains why other semantically related verbs do not show stem alternations and proposes contrastive hierarchies to represent variations in stem inventories intra- and cross-linguistically assuming that the selection of a stem for a particular semantic category follows a series of binary choices that characterize the opposition’s active in the language.

Alternations of classificatory verb stems in Tłı̨chǫ Yatıì: a cognitive semantic account

This paper investigates the phenomenon of ‘classificatory verbs’, i.e. a set of motion and positional verbs that show stem alternations depending on the semantic features of one of their arguments in Tłı̨chǫ Yatıì (Dogrib), based on field notes and documentary sources of the language. The paper shows that Tłı̨chǫ classificatory verbal categories belong to four semantic subclasses which have inconsistent stem inventories caused by the presence or absence of some semantic features. Stem inventories of locative verb systems vary depending on the scalar [effort] feature, and those of motion verbs correlate with the scalar [agentive] feature. The paper explains why other semantically related verbs do not show stem alternations and proposes contrastive hierarchies to represent variations in stem inventories intra- and cross-linguistically assuming that the selection of a stem for a particular semantic category follows a series of binary choices that characterize the opposition’s active in the language.