2011/06/25 by Mohammed Abdellaoui, Olivier L'Haridon, Olivier L’Haridon +1 · 157 citations
Decision Sciences · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Cumulative prospect theory #Decision maker #Decision theory #Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics #Econometrics #Economic and Environmental Valuation #Economics #Expected utility hypothesis #Forecasting Techniques and Applications #Loss aversion #Management science #Mathematical economics #Microeconomics #Prospect theory #Risk aversion (psychology) #Weighting
paper · doi:10.1287/mnsc.1110.1368
published in Management Science 57(10), 1879-1895 (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences)
openalex publication_date 2011/06/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
This paper reports on the results of an experimental elicitation at the individual level of all prospect theory components (i.e., utility, loss aversion, and weighting functions) in two decision contexts: situations where alternatives are described as probability distributions and situations where the decision maker must experience unknown probability distributions through sampling before choice. For description-based decisions, our results are fully consistent with prospect theory's empirical findings under risk. Furthermore, no significant differences are detected across contexts as regards utility and loss aversion. Whereas decision weights exhibit similar qualitative properties across contexts typically found under prospect theory, our data suggest that, for gains at least, the subjective treatment of uncertainty in experience-based and description-based decisions is significantly different. More specifically, we observe a less pronounced overweighting of small probabilities and a more pronounced underweighting of moderate and high probabilities for experience-based decisions. On the contrary, for losses, no significant differences were observed in the evaluation of prospects across contexts. This paper was accepted by George Wu, decision analysis.