Every attribute can be expressed in multiple ways. For example, car fuel economy can be expressed as fuel efficiency (“miles per gallon”), fuel cost in dollars, or tons of greenhouse gases emitted. Each expression, or “translation”, highlights a different aspect of the same attribute. We...

Economists have traditionally treated preferences as exogenously given. Preferences are assumed to be influenced by neither beliefs nor the constraints people face. As a consequence, changes in behaviour are explained exclusively in terms of changes in the set of feasible alternatives. Here the...

Based upon a recently developed multiattribute generalization of prospect theory's value function (Tversky and Kahneman 1991), we argue that consumer choice is influenced by the position of brands relative to multiattribute reference points, and that consumers weigh losses from a reference point...

Loss aversion and reference dependence are 2 keystones of behavioral theories of choice, but little is known about their underlying cognitive processes. We suggest an additional account for loss aversion that supplements the current account of the value encoding of attributes as gains or losses...

The authors examine how a constructive preferences perspective might change the prevailing view of medical decision making by suggesting that the methods used to measure preferences for medical treatments can change the preferences that are reported. The authors focus on 2 possible techniques...