Reference-Point Formation and Updating
通过金融情境实验，研究决策者如何根据价格序列信息形成和更新参考点，发现参考价格由序列首尾价格组合决定，中间价格权重较小且不衰减，并提出了一个简洁的预测公式。
Reference-dependent preferences have been well accepted in decision sciences, experimental economics, behavioral finance, and marketing. However, we still know very little about how decision makers form and update their reference points given a sequence of information. Our paper provides some novel experiments in a financial context to advance the understanding of reference-point formation over time. Our subjects' reference price is best described as a combination of the first and the last price of the time series, with intermediate prices receiving smaller and nondecaying weights. Hence, reference prices are not recursive. We provide a parsimonious formula to predict the reference points, which we test out-of-sample. The fit of the model is reasonably good. This paper was accepted by George Wu, decision analysis.