Stochastic models of choice behavior 论文

摘要

The notion of “utility” is fundamental in most current theories of human decision. The problem of determining the utility function of a given decision maker, however, presents grave difficulties. It is not sufficient to determine the decision maker's rank-order preference of choices, because such a rank-order preference would determine his utility only on an ordinal scale, not the interval scale required in many decision problems. The problem is further complicated by the fact that even the preference choices of the chooser are often inconsistent with each other. T o circumvent the latter difficulty, stochastic definitions of utilities have been proposed in which probabilities (frequencies) of preference choices become the basic data. Here the implications of some of these models are derived which enable the experimenter to decide whether a given model is consistent with a set of data. Appropriate statistical sampling tests are worked out.