Rubinstein, the Nobel Prize economics nominee, conducted a
classroom survey and found the majority of the students did not have transitive
preferences that their preferences sometimes contradicted with each other. From
the results of the survey, it is clear that students can tell their preferences
between several choices, but their decisions may contradict the decisions they
had made previously.
Of course, people can change their individual preferences
over times, it is not surprising to see that people make different preference
choices. However, in this case, people change their individuals within a very
limited time period (a time period that is only enough to finish a survey), it
shows individuals change their preferences stochastically. To study into the
case, we can see that individuals are very likely to make preference decisions
independently and randomly without considering the previous decisions they have
made. Moreover, especially when making simple preference decisions, people do
not want to treat it very seriously or put too much efforts on it, so they tend
to make decisions with only one step of thinking, make their decisions in terms
of key words, no matter if it is a simple or a complicated case. From
Rubinstein’s experiment, this is clearly shown, when more details are added
into one question, even with the preferences of these additional details have
already been answered by the students, the students still make decisions that
contradict their previous decisions.
To conclude, if we do not think carefully, we can make
contradicted decisions, especially when the key words can determine our
preferences and lead us to making different decisions. This is referred as
lexicographic preferences.
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