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Does Repetition Improve Consistency?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

John D. Hey
John D. Hey*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, University of York, York Y01 5DD, UK and Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche, Universita Degli Studi di Bari, via Camillo Rosalba 53, 70124 Bari, Italy
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Abstract

Much experimental effort has been expended in attempts to establish the relative superiority of Expected Utility theory and the many recently-developed alternatives as descriptions of the behaviour of subjects in risky choice decision problems. The cumulative evidence shows clearly that there is a great deal of noise in the experimental data, which makes it difficult to identify the ‘best’ description of such behaviour. This paper reports on an experiment which seeks to determine whether such noise is relatively transitory and decays with experience and repetition, and thus whether a clearly ‘best’ theory emerges as a result of such repetition. We find that for some subjects this does indeed appear to be the case, while for other subjects the noise remains high and the identification of the underlying preference function remains difficult.

Keywords

expected utilitynon-expected utilitydecision under riskrepetitionerrors

JEL classification

D81: Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty C81: Methodology for Collecting, Estimating, and Organizing Microeconomic Data • Data Access
Type
Research Article
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , June 2001 , pp. 5 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 Economic Science Association

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