On a Lottery Pricing Anomaly: Time Tells the Tale.

This article identifies a lottery pricing anomaly, which I call the "r=x" anomaly," that is present in past pricing experiments--namely, a tendency for subjects to announce that their minimum selling price for some binary lottery is the greater of the two lottery prizes. The study shows that the anomaly is inconsistent with two theoretical explanations for another well-known pricing anomaly (preference reversal) and experimentally replicates those inconsistencies. The new experiment also measures the time subjects spend making their pricing decisions. These decision-time measurements suggest that the r=x anomaly may be a decision-cost effect. Copyright 1993 by Kluwer Academic Publishers