Simultaneous Preferences for Hedging and Doubling Down: Focal Prospects, Background Positions, and Nonconsequentialist Conceptualizations of Uncertainty
研究发现，当人们已有未解决的背景头寸时，会非后果主义地将新前景视为与背景一致或相反的赌注，从而同时表现出对冲和加倍下注的偏好，挑战了传统决策理论的后果主义假设。
Most theories of decision making are consequentialist. They presume that people evaluate prospects on the basis of potential outcomes. However, people may often conceptualize prospects in part nonconsequentially. Consider someone evaluating a new, “focal” prospect given an unresolved “background” position to which that person is already exposed. If the two are positively correlated, the individual may conceptualize the focal prospect as a bet “with” the individual’s background position; if they are negatively correlated, the individual may conceptualize the focal prospect as a bet “against” the individual’s background position. Because people like to be consistent, this nonconsequentialist conceptualization may induce a taste for betting “with” the background position. Such bets constitute risk-seeking doubling down, not risk-averse hedging. Indeed, we observe that relative to corresponding background-less choices, participants with unresolved background positions are relatively risk-seeking, favoring positively rather than negatively correlated focal prospects. They also sometimes show a simultaneous taste for both doubling down and hedging. Data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2918 . This paper was accepted by Manel Baucells, decision analysis.