Analyses of human reaction to economic incentives reveal contradictory deviations from maximization. For example, underinvestment in the stock market suggests risk aversion, but insufficient diversification of financial assets suggests risk-seeking. Leading explanations for these contradictions assume that different choice environments (e.g., different framings) trigger different biases. Our analysis shows that variation in the choice environment is not a necessary condition. It demonstrates how certain changes in the incentive structure are sufficient to trigger six pairs of contradictory deviations from maximization even when the choice environment is fixed. Moreover, our analysis shows that the direction of these deviations can be captured by assuming that choice propensities reflect reliance on small samples of past experiences. In order to clarify the underlying processes, we considered distinct models of the reliance on small samples assumption, and compared them to classical models of choice (including prospect theory). The comparison focused on both within-individual, and between-group predictions (based on a preregistered study with 120 new tasks). The results reveal large advantage of "wide sampling" models that (in the static settings we examine) approximate an effort to rely on the most similar past experiences. Surprisingly, we also found that assuming that the parameters reflect stable individual traits impairs predictions; it seems that the number of "most similar past experiences" for each individual varies from task to task. These results suggest that ignoring the predictable impact of the incentive structure can lead to exaggeration of the importance of environment- and individual-specific decision biases. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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最大化的矛盾偏差：特定环境的偏见，或人类学习基本属性的反映？

对人类对经济激励的反应的分析揭示了与最大化的矛盾偏差。例如，股票市场投资不足表明风险规避，但金融资产多元化不足表明风险寻求。对这些矛盾的主要解释假设不同的选择环境（例如，不同的框架）会引发不同的偏见。我们的分析表明，选择环境的变化不是必要条件。它展示了即使选择环境是固定的，激励结构的某些变化如何足以触发六对矛盾的最大化偏差。此外，我们的分析表明，可以通过假设选择倾向反映对过去经验的小样本的依赖来捕捉这些偏差的方向。为了阐明潜在的过程，我们考虑了依赖小样本假设的不同模型，并将它们与经典的选择模型（包括前景理论）进行了比较。比较侧重于个体内和组间预测（基于包含 120 个新任务的预注册研究）。结果揭示了“广泛采样”模型的巨大优势，这些模型（在我们检查的静态设置中）近似于依赖最相似的过去经验的努力。令人惊讶的是，我们还发现假设参数反映稳定的个体特征会损害预测；似乎每个人“最相似的过去经历”的数量因任务而异。这些结果表明，忽略激励结构的可预测影响会导致夸大环境和个人特定决策偏差的重要性。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2023 APA，保留所有权利）。