Risky decision making: Testing for violations of transitivity predicted by an editing mechanism

Transitivity is the assumption that if a person prefers a to b and b to c,then that person should prefer a to c. this article explores a paradigm in which birnbaum,patton and lott (1999) thought people might be systematically intransitive. many undergraduates choose c = ($96,.85; $90,.05; $12,.10) over a = ($96,.9; $14,.05; $12,.05),violating dominance. perhaps people would detect dominance in simpler choices,such as a versus b = ($96,.9; $12,.10) and b versus c,and yet continue to violate it in the choice between a and c,which would violate transitivity. in this study we apply a true and error model to test intransitive preferences predicted by a partially effective editing mechanism. the results replicated previous findings quite well; however,the true and error model indicated that very few,if any,participants exhibited true intransitive preferences. in addition,violations of stochastic dominance showed a strong and systematic decrease in prevalence over time and violated response independence,thus violating key assumptions of standard random preference models for analysis of transitivity. © 2016,society for judgment and decision making. all rights reserved.