IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/inm/ormnsc/v49y2003i1p102-115.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Optimal Conflict in Preference Assessment

Author

Listed:
  • Philippe Delquié

    (INSEAD, Boulevard de Constance, Fontainebleau 77300, France)

Abstract

Conflict arises in decision making when the choice alternatives present strong advantages and disadvantages over one another, that is, when the trade--offs involved are large. Conflict affects human response to choice, in particular, it increases decision difficulty and response unreliability. On the other hand, larger trade--offs, i.e., higher conflict, reveal more information about an individual's preferences and mitigate the influence of measurement unreliability on preference model estimation. This suggests, somewhat counterintuitively, that there may exist some optimal level of conflict for efficient measurement of preferences. How to determine this level? This issue is examined from behavioral and analytical angles. We outline a general analysis of the interaction between trade--off size and modeling accuracy, and demonstrate its application on a simple example. The kind of analysis developed here can be conveniently implemented in a computer spreadsheet, and would be especially valuable when large amounts of preference data are to be collected, as in consumer preference studies, experimental research, and contingent valuation surveys.

Suggested Citation

  • Philippe Delquié, 2003. "Optimal Conflict in Preference Assessment," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 49(1), pages 102-115, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:49:y:2003:i:1:p:102-115
    DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.49.1.102.12751
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.49.1.102.12751
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1287/mnsc.49.1.102.12751?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Hogarth, Robin M. (ed.), 1990. "Insights in Decision Making," University of Chicago Press Economics Books, University of Chicago Press, edition 1, number 9780226348551, December.
    2. John C. Hershey & Howard C. Kunreuther & Paul J. H. Schoemaker, 1982. "Sources of Bias in Assessment Procedures for Utility Functions," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 28(8), pages 936-954, August.
    3. Tversky, Amos & Kahneman, Daniel, 1992. "Advances in Prospect Theory: Cumulative Representation of Uncertainty," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 5(4), pages 297-323, October.
    4. Jehoshua Eliashberg & John R. Hauser, 1985. "A Measurement Error Approach for Modeling Consumer Risk Preference," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 31(1), pages 1-25, January.
    5. Han Bleichrodt & Jose Luis Pinto, 2000. "A Parameter-Free Elicitation of the Probability Weighting Function in Medical Decision Analysis," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 46(11), pages 1485-1496, November.
    6. Kathryn Blackmond Laskey & Gregory W. Fischer, 1987. "Estimating Utility Functions in the Presence of Response Error," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 33(8), pages 965-980, August.
    7. Gregory W. Fischer & Mary Frances Luce & Jianmin Jia, 2000. "Attribute Conflict and Preference Uncertainty: Effects on Judgment Time and Error," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 46(1), pages 88-103, January.
    8. Gregory, Robin & Lichtenstein, Sarah & Slovic, Paul, 1993. "Valuing Environmental Resources: A Constructive Approach," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 7(2), pages 177-197, October.
    9. Luce, Mary Frances, 1998. "Choosing to Avoid: Coping with Negatively Emotion-Laden Consumer Decisions," Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research Inc., vol. 24(4), pages 409-433, March.
    10. Gregory W. Fischer & Jianmin Jia & Mary Frances Luce, 2000. "Attribute Conflict and Preference Uncertainty: The RandMAU Model," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 46(5), pages 669-684, May.
    11. George Wu & Richard Gonzalez, 1996. "Curvature of the Probability Weighting Function," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 42(12), pages 1676-1690, December.
    12. Dhar, Ravi & Nowlis, Stephen M, 1999. "The Effect of Time Pressure on Consumer Choice Deferral," Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research Inc., vol. 25(4), pages 369-384, March.
    13. Subimal Chatterjee & Timothy B. Heath, 1996. "Conflict and Loss Aversion in Multiattribute Choice: The Effects of Trade-Off Size and Reference Dependence on Decision Difficulty," Post-Print hal-00670460, HAL.
    14. James E. Hartley, 1996. "Retrospectives: The Origins of the Representative Agent," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 10(2), pages 169-177, Spring.
    15. Chatterjee, Subimal & Heath, Timothy B., 1996. "Conflict and Loss Aversion in Multiattribute Choice: The Effects of Trade-Off Size and Reference Dependence on Decision Difficulty," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 67(2), pages 144-155, August.
    16. Mohammed Abdellaoui, 2000. "Parameter-Free Elicitation of Utility and Probability Weighting Functions," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 46(11), pages 1497-1512, November.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kurt A. Carlson & Samuel D. Bond, 2006. "Improving Preference Assessment: Limiting the Effect of Context Through Pre-exposure to Attribute Levels," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 52(3), pages 410-421, March.
    2. Deparis, Stéphane & Mousseau, Vincent & Öztürk, Meltem & Pallier, Christophe & Huron, Caroline, 2012. "When conflict induces the expression of incomplete preferences," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 221(3), pages 593-602.
    3. Aloysius, John A. & Davis, Fred D. & Wilson, Darryl D. & Ross Taylor, A. & Kottemann, Jeffrey E., 2006. "User acceptance of multi-criteria decision support systems: The impact of preference elicitation techniques," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 169(1), pages 273-285, February.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Cheng, Yin-Hui & Chuang, Shih-Chieh & Pei-I Yu, Annie & Lai, Wan-Ting, 2019. "Change in your wallet, change your choice: The effect of the change-matching heuristic on choice," Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Elsevier, vol. 49(C), pages 67-76.
    2. Joost M. E. Pennings & Ale Smidts, 2003. "The Shape of Utility Functions and Organizational Behavior," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 49(9), pages 1251-1263, September.
    3. Christopher Schwand & Rudolf Vetschera & Lea Wakolbinger, 2010. "The influence of probabilities on the response mode bias in utility elicitation," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 69(3), pages 395-416, September.
    4. Mohammed Abdellaoui & Olivier L’Haridon & Horst Zank, 2010. "Separating curvature and elevation: A parametric probability weighting function," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 41(1), pages 39-65, August.
    5. Hamza Bahaji, 2011. "Incentives from stock option grants: a behavioral approach," Post-Print halshs-00681607, HAL.
    6. Jakusch, Sven Thorsten, 2017. "On the applicability of maximum likelihood methods: From experimental to financial data," SAFE Working Paper Series 148, Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE, revised 2017.
    7. Ulrich Schmidt & Horst Zank, 2008. "Risk Aversion in Cumulative Prospect Theory," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 54(1), pages 208-216, January.
    8. Mohammed Abdellaoui & Emmanuel Kemel, 2014. "Eliciting Prospect Theory When Consequences Are Measured in Time Units: “Time Is Not Money”," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 60(7), pages 1844-1859, July.
    9. Han Bleichrodt, 2002. "A new explanation for the difference between time trade‐off utilities and standard gamble utilities," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 11(5), pages 447-456, July.
    10. Miles S. Kimball & Collin B. Raymond & Jiannan Zhou & Junya Zhou & Fumio Ohtake & Yoshiro Tsutsui, 2024. "Happiness Dynamics, Reference Dependence, and Motivated Beliefs in U.S. Presidential Elections," NBER Working Papers 32078, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    11. Han Bleichrodt & Jose Maria Abellan-Perpiñan & Jose Luis Pinto-Prades & Ildefonso Mendez-Martinez, 2007. "Resolving Inconsistencies in Utility Measurement Under Risk: Tests of Generalizations of Expected Utility," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 53(3), pages 469-482, March.
    12. Oliver, Adam, 2003. "The internal consistency of the standard gamble: tests after adjusting for prospect theory," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 159, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    13. Jakusch, Sven Thorsten & Meyer, Steffen & Hackethal, Andreas, 2019. "Taming models of prospect theory in the wild? Estimation of Vlcek and Hens (2011)," SAFE Working Paper Series 146, Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE, revised 2019.
    14. Gurevich, Gregory & Kliger, Doron & Levy, Ori, 2009. "Decision-making under uncertainty - A field study of cumulative prospect theory," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 33(7), pages 1221-1229, July.
    15. Víctor González-Jiménez, 2021. "Incentive contracts when agents distort probabilities," Vienna Economics Papers vie2101, University of Vienna, Department of Economics.
    16. Wei Wang & Huifu Xu, 2023. "Preference robust distortion risk measure and its application," Mathematical Finance, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 33(2), pages 389-434, April.
    17. Arjan Verschoor & Ben D’Exelle, 2022. "Probability weighting for losses and for gains among smallholder farmers in Uganda," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 92(1), pages 223-258, February.
    18. Peter Brooks & Simon Peters & Horst Zank, 2014. "Risk behavior for gain, loss, and mixed prospects," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 77(2), pages 153-182, August.
    19. Mohammed Abdellaoui & Olivier L'Haridon & Corina Paraschiv, 2011. "Experienced vs. Described Uncertainty: Do We Need Two Prospect Theory Specifications?," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 57(10), pages 1879-1895, October.
    20. Mohammed Abdellaoui & Han Bleichrodt & Corina Paraschiv, 2007. "Loss Aversion Under Prospect Theory: A Parameter-Free Measurement," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 53(10), pages 1659-1674, October.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:49:y:2003:i:1:p:102-115. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Asher (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/inforea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.