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Chapter 36: Economic Preferences or Attitude Expressions? An Analysis of Dollar Responses to Public Issues

Chapter 36: Economic Preferences or Attitude Expressions? An Analysis of Dollar Responses to Public Issues

pp. 642-672

Authors

, Princeton University, , Hebrew University, , University of Texas
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Summary

ABSTRACT. Participants in contingent valuation surveys and jurors setting punitive damages in civil trials provide answers denominated in dollars. These answers are better understood as expressions of attitudes than as indications of economic preference. Well-established characteristics of attitudes and of the core process of affective valuation explain several robust features of dollar responses: high correlations with other measures of attractiveness or aversiveness, insensitivity to scope, preference reversals, and the high variability of dollar responses relative to other measures of the same attitude.

KEY WORDS preferences, attitudes, contingent valuation, psychology and economics, utility assessment

JEL Classification D00, H00

INTRODUCTION

Economics and psychology offer contrasting perspectives on the question of how people value things. The economic model of choice is concerned with a rational agent whose preferences obey a tight web of logical rules, formalized in consumer theory and in models of decision making under risk. The tradition of psychology, in contrast, is not congenial to the idea that a logic of rational choice can serve double duty as a model of actual decision behavior. Much behavioral research has been devoted to illustrations of choices that violate the logic of the economic model. The implied claim is that people do not have preferences, in the sense in which that term is used in economic theory (Fischhoff, 1991; Slovic, 1995; Payne, Bettman and Johnson, 1992). It is therefore fair to ask: If people do not have economic preferences, what do they have instead?

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