Cognitive Mechanisms of Subjective Value in Multi-Attribute Pricing

Understanding how people assign subjective value to outcomes with multiple attributes, such asrisk and delay, is central to understanding the structure and manifestation of economic preferences. However, multi-attribute preference has been primarily studied through binary choices.The price at which a person would buy, sell, or equate each prospect offers another measure ofsubjective value that may diverge from multi-attribute choice. In both risky and intertemporaldomains, choice and price preferences exhibit systematic preference reversals, where a smaller,sooner, or safer option is chosen while a larger, later, or riskier alternative is assigned a higherprice. The present study takes a deep dive into how subjective value is assigned in each casein an attempt to reconcile these diverging measurements and methods of assessing value. Toexplain how and why preferences change across choice and price, the domains of gains andlosses, price frames of buying and selling, and varying levels of time pressure, we develop atwo-step neural network-based modeling approach. First, we tested cognitive mechanisms underlying value-based judgments and decisions using a switchboard model comparison. Next,we fit and evaluated individualized joint models, where all data from an individual is modeledusing parameters and mechanisms that are specific to their best-fitting model structure. Whilemechanisms like delay discounting and risk aversion are common to both models, our resultssuggest that anchoring and payoff sensitivity diverged between pricing and choice. Extensivedifferences across elicitation procedures indicate that a common representation of value mayremain elusive.