Biased preferences: Measurement of objective and subjective object features

Riccardo Pedersini
Visual Attention Laboratory
Brigham & Women's Hospital
Harvard Medical School

Le Menestrel and Lemaire’s formalisation provides a rigorous tool for
studying choice situations where objective features (easy to measure)
interact with subjective ones (difficult to measure). Moreover, the
required assumptions are less restrictive than for many of the
cardinal utility measures available, which makes this measure
applicable to a broader range of settings. This representation will
be proven useful in two very different choice situations: in the
first one the participants of an experiment face the trade-off
between their own monetary interest and a non-enforced rule imposing
fairness; in the second one the participants of another experiment
need to rely on their autonomous responses in order to guess the
right choice in an implicit learning grammar task.