Author
Güney, Begüm, Richter, M.
Publication Date
2015-11
Publication Place
-
Elsevier
Subject
Experiment, Choice, Aspiration, Phantom, Similarity, Reversal
Type
Periodical
Language
English
Digital
Yes
Manuscript
No
Library
Özyeğin University
Library Asset ID
1879-1751
Record ID
6d1a4b9d-b1a2-41b8-b378-cb71118bab34
Library Location
Economics
Date
2015-11
Notes
Due to copyright restrictions, the access to the full text of this article is only available via subscription.
Sample Text
This paper experimentally studies the influence of aspirations on choice. Motivated by the theoretical model of Guney et al. (2015), we consider choice problems which may include unavailable alternatives. In a choice problem, an aspiration is the most desired alternative there (available or not). In our design, we endogenously derive both aspirations and a subjective similarity notion that operates between an aspiration and other alternatives. We find that (i) choice reversals are more likely when an unavailable aspiration alternative is added into the environment than when an unavailable non-aspiration alternative is added, (ii) an available option is more likely to be chosen when there is an unavailable aspiration that is similar to it compared to when there is no such option in the environment, (iii) choices are better explained by a similarity-based procedure when the subjective similarity notion that is derived in a separate part of the experiment is used rather than the Euclidean distance.
DOI
10.1016/j.jebo.2015.09.012
Cilt
119
