Buying/Selling Price Preference Reversals: Preference for Environmental Changes in Buying versus Selling Modes

Many studies have shown that the most people are willing to pay to obtain an object often is significantly less than the least they will accept to relinquish the object (i.e., selling prices tend to be higher than buying prices). Most tests of the buying/selling price discrepancy have elicited values either for everyday market items (e.g., mugs, candy bars) or for environmental changes (e.g., a decrease in air quality, a landfill clean-up). The literature indicates a possible interaction between buying/selling prices and commodity type; buying/selling price differences seem greater for environmental improvements than for market items. In other words, people show more relative preference for environmental improvements in selling modes than they do in buying modes. A significant difference in preference due to elicitation mode is commonly termed a "preference reversal." The four experiments presented here establish this new preference reversal and examine the reasons for it. The results from these studies provide information about the nature of preference reversals, the valuation process as a whole, and the unique problem of valuing complex and risky items such as environmental changes.     

Posterior probabilities for a consensus ordering

In the situation where subjects independently rank order a fixed set of items, the idea of a consensus ordering of the items is defined and employed as a parameter in a class of probability models for rankings. In the context of such models, which generalize those of Mallows, posterior probabilities may be easily formed about the population consensus ordering. An example of rankings obtained by the Graduate Record Examination Board is presented to demonstrate the adequacy of these generalized Mallows' models for describing actual data sets of rankings and to illustrate convenient summaries of the posterior probabilities for the consensus ordering.The authors thank Leann Birch for permission to refer to her experiment on cracker preferences, and the Graduate Record Examination Board for permission to use primary data from the Pike Report in our example. We also thank the referees for helpful comments.     

Nonparametric Estimation of Item and Respondent Locations from Unfolding-type Items

Unlike their monotone counterparts, nonparametric unfolding response models, which assume the item response function is unimodal, have seen little attention in the psychometric literature. This paper studies the nonparametric behavior of unfolding models by building on the work of Post (1992). The paper provides rigorous justification for a class of nonparametric estimators of respondents’ latent attitudes by proving that the estimators consistently rank order the respondents. The paper also suggests an algorithm for the rank ordering of items along the attitudes scale. Finally, the methods are evaluated using simulated data. This research was supported in part by an Educational Testing Service Gulliksen Fellowship, and by the National Science Foundation, Grant DMS-97.05032. The author would like to thank Brian Junker for his help and support on this paper and Paul Holland, Steve Fienberg, and Jay Kadane for their helpful comments.     

Non-Prioritized Ranked Belief Change

Traditional accounts of belief change have been criticized for placing undue emphasis on the new belief provided as input. A recent proposal to address such issues is a framework for non-prioritized belief change based on default theories (Ghose and Goebel, 1998). A novel feature of this approach is the introduction of disbeliefs alongside beliefs which allows for a view of belief contraction as independently useful, instead of just being seen as an intermediate step in the process of belief revision. This approach is, however, restrictive in assuming a linear ordering of reliability on the received inputs. In this paper, we replace the linear ordering with a preference ranking on inputs from which a total preorder on inputs can be induced. This extension brings along with it the problem of dealing with inputs of equal rank. We provide a semantic solution to this problem which contains, as a special case, AGM belief change on closed theories.     

Work Values, Gender, and Expectations About Work Commitment and Pay: Laying the Groundwork for the “Motherhood Penalty”?

The gender pay gap most seriously affects women with children—a situation labeled the motherhood penalty. One common explanation is that mothers value family more than employment, leading to reduced work commitment and hence to lower pay. Using a questionnaire, we examined the relationship between endorsement of two work-related values (family and power), anticipated work commitment, and expected peak pay among 229 undergraduates at a southeastern U.S. university. Men expected higher peak salaries, valued power more and family less than women. For both genders, valuing power predicted higher expected peak salary and valuing family predicted lower anticipated work commitment. For women, reduced work commitment, in turn, predicted lower anticipated peak pay. For men, valuing family predicted higher peak pay expectations.     

The pursuit of happiness can be lonely

Few things seem more natural and functional than wanting to be happy. We suggest that, counter to this intuition, valuing happiness may have some surprising negative consequences. Specifically, because striving for personal gains can damage connections with others and because happiness is usually defined in terms of personal positive feelings (a personal gain) in western contexts, striving for happiness might damage people's connections with others and make them lonely. In 2 studies, we provide support for this hypothesis. Study 1 suggests that the more people value happiness, the lonelier they feel on a daily basis (assessed over 2 weeks with diaries). Study 2 provides an experimental manipulation of valuing happiness and demonstrates that inducing people to value happiness leads to relatively greater loneliness, as measured by self-reports and a hormonal index (progesterone). In each study, key potential confounds, such as positive and negative affect, were ruled out. These findings suggest that wanting to be happy can make people lonely. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Barrier effects in the cognitive maps of children and adults

To study spatial representation, Kosslyn, Pick, and Fariello (Child Development, 1974, 45, 707–716) asked preschoolers and adults to learn toy locations in a room divided into quadrants. When asked to rank order the closeness of toys, preschoolers exaggerated distances between objects separated by opaque or transparent barriers; adults distorted across opaque barriers only. The findings were interpreted as showing that children's spatial representations may rely more than adults' on functional distance and/or that children may have more difficulty than adults keeping many objects in mind simultaneously (integrative processing capacity). The Kosslyn et al. procedure was repeated here with first graders and adults, using either rank ordering techniques or direct distance estimations. Interactions of age and barrier appeared for the rank ordering measure only. Children showed a greater tendency than adults to group their rankings by quadrant. With the distance estimation measure, adults were quantitatively more accurate than children, at least among males; barrier effects interacted with sex and distance, but not age. These findings suggest the importance of integrative processing capacity, and that different dependent measures may tap different processes.     

An axiomatic basis for distributional equality in utilitarianism

An axiomatic basis for a social preference ordering with interval-scaled utility levels satisfying the principles of anonymity and pareto superiority is elaborated. The ordering is required to be sensitive to distributional equality: Redistribution of utility income from poor to rich persons without changing their social rank should lead to a superior evaluation. The axiom of separability is weakened in order to make it compatible with distributional equality. We prove that every continuous ordering satisfying the upper axioms can be represented by a utility function which is positively linear on the convex cone of rank-ordered utility vectors. A modified unnormalized Gini coefficient is one possible choice, but it contradicts, as well as related proposals, the principle of adequacy of means for some distribution problems.     

Memory Structures for Relational Escalation A Cognitive Test of the Sequencing of Relational Actions and Stages

On the basis of memory structure research, a series of four studies was conducted in order to determine whether individuals (1) could generate memory structures for escalating relationships, (2) agree on the rank ordering of expected actions, (3) distinguish between the perceived typicality of such actions and how necessary the behaviors were in order for a relationship to develop, and (4) segment prototypical scenes of escalating relationships in a time-ordered linear sequence. A number of hypotheses dealing with the generation and processing of expectations for relationship growth are offered and discussed. Additionally, gender differences are posited in which women generate more escalating actions, process relationship memory structures faster, and rate common actions as being more typical than men do. Results revealed a prototypical escalating memory structure containing 13 behaviors that could be processed and understood in terms of four underlying factors. Gender differences were also observed, and these are discussed in terms of females closely monitoring relational trajectories. Implications of memory structure research for analyzing relational stages are discussed as well.     

Automated Assessment of Reasons For Joining an Organization

An automated instrument capable of identifying and rank ordering reasons for joining the United States Marine Corps was developed and administered to a sample of 150 men. Testing time ranged from slightly less than 3 min to 5 1/2 min. Because of its ease of administration and effectiveness in identifying motivators, the automated instrument holds significant potential for use in a variety of settings in which personal characteristics (e.g., preferences, choice criteria, values, etc.) must be rapidly identified.     

Effects of rank ordering stimuli on magnitude ratings of these and other stimuli

Five experiments investigated the effects of rank ordering stimuli on subsequent magnitude ratings of these and other stimuli. In Experiments 1 and 2, subjects first rank ordered environmental issues in terms of their importance. Ranking stimuli from “most” to “least” led to more extreme ratings than ranking them from “least” to “most,” regardless of whether the rating criterion was the same as or diametrically opposite to the ranking criterion. (For example, subjects who had previously ranked them beginning with the most important issue subsequently rated these issues not only as more important, but also as more trivial, than did subjects who had ranked them beginning with the least important.) These effects generalized to stimuli other than those that had previously been ranked, and generalized over stimulus domains. (For example, ratings of environmental issues were also affected by ranking the importance of attributes of a marriage partner.) Other experiments in the series circumscribed the conditions in which these effects occur. Results suggested that rank ordering stimuli leads subjects to adopt comparative standards, the use of which generalizes to subsequent magnitude rating tasks and produces an anchoring bias similar to that identified by A. Tversky and D. Kahneman (1974, Science (Washington, D.C.), 185, 1124–1131). Implications of these results for the cognitive processes that underlie social judgment are discussed.     

Complexity of visual icons studied via signal detection theory

Two investigations on how humans perceive information from visually rendered complex objects, such as military icons (glyphs) were conducted. A signal detection theory framework was employed to evaluate the sensitivity and specificity of human subject performance. The 6 adults tested showed that as complexity increased, their accuracy in performance decreased. Study 1 showed that complex dimensions (features) could not be assigned arbitrarily. Study 2 developed a rank ordering for features of an iconic object.     

Acquiring complex partial orderings in comparison with acquiring similar-sized linear orderings

The acquisition of a 14-term partial ordering was compared with the acquisition of a 14-term linear ordering. Learning the partial ordering was found to be more difficult because of two factors: (1) Subjects do not appear to have in their knowledge systems a prototype or rule for representing a long list of comparative relations as a partial ordering structure, and (2) the partial ordering must be presented so that some of the adjacently presented premises do not contain a common element. When these two factors were controlled, the partial ordering was as easy to learn as the linear ordering. It was also found that subjects learning the partial ordering showed no evidence of a serial position learning curve, whereas subjects learning the linear ordering showed some tendency to produce a serial position learning curve.     

New Manager Socialization and Conflict Management in China: Effects of Relationship and Open Conflict Values1

How newcomers interact with experienced employees has been thought to affect their socialization and performance. This study complements previous newcomer research by examining the role of organizational values on this interaction. Middle managers newly recruited into a large telecom company in China were randomly assigned to discuss a conflict with an existing employee where the organization either valued relationships or not, and either valued open discussion of diverse ideas or not. As expected, valuing relationship and open discussion, compared to not valuing relationship and avoiding discussion, facilitated new managers' socialization and helped them develop cooperative goals and quality leader–member exchange. Results were interpreted that by embracing values of relationships and open discussion, organizations can more effectively socialize newcomers.     

Experiments comparing qualitative approaches to rank ordering of multiattribute alternatives

ZAPROS, a method to support rank ordering tasks using ordinal input from decision makers, is discussed and compared with a preference cone technique and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). It provides a means to identify inconsistencies in ordinal decision tasks, yielding verification and explanation of results for partial ordering of a large set of alternatives. The results indicate that ZAPROS provides no less accuracy in task solution, while having some advantages from a behavioural point of view. Comparative analysis of the effectiveness of the methods under consideration in accordance with differences in task characteristics is carried out.     

VALUES,DESIRES, AND LOVE: REFLECTIONS ON WOLLHEIM'S MORAL PSYCHOLOGY

In The Thread of Life, Richard Wollheim argues that a person's sense of value is grounded in the power of love to generate certain favourable perceptions of an object. Following from his view is a psychoanalytic conception of valuing as constituted by the imaginative force of phantasy, rather than rational deliberation. In this paper, I shall defend this conception with a view to explaining the relation between values and desires. I suggest that valuing qua phantasy‐making can ‘tune up’ a person's desires to fit his perception of the good. Such power of phantasy is to be contrasted with various types of motivational failure in moral imagination. Finally, I argue that ‘effective valuing’, which makes us capable of desiring what we perceive to be good, requires an affective kind of imagination which assures us that we have the ability to love and to be loved.     

Problem solving and the search for crucial evidence

Summary Four experiments are reported that examine performance on a complex reasoning task. Subjects have to determine which factory has polluted a river by ordering a series of tests for the presence or absence of various pollutants. Previous research has shown that people typically employ a non-optimal exhaustive search stragegy on this task. Experiments 1 and 2 attempt to identify some of the boundary conditions of this strategy. It is found that the order in which pollutants appear on the matrix list does not seem to be a critical factor, whereas the overall size of the factory-pollutant matrix is. Experiments 3 and 4 attempt to deter people directly from adopting the exhaustive strategy. The results show that even when people are deterred from using the exhaustive method, this will not necessarily result in their adopting a more efficient strategy.     

Distinction in Psychology and the Alma Mater

With use of several indices of distinction, the biographies of selected samples of psychologists were examined to determine which educational institutions produced a disproportionate number of those alumni who recently have occupied positions of eminence in the field. Unlike other investigations that have attempted to rank departments of psychology on the basis of the quality of their current faculties, the present study focused on the doctoral and baccalaureate origins of prominent psychologists rather than on the institutions where they now reside. In general, it was found that among well established psychology programs, the same few universities tend to have produced more than their share of doctoral students who made significant career contributions to the field, although the precise rank ordering varied according to the particular index of distinction employed. With notable exceptions, the higher ranking graduate programs were also the undergraduate alma maters of a significant proportion of this same generation of scholars.     

Response to the Comments by Larichev,Korhonen and Vargas on ‘Power Relations and Group Aggregation in the Multiplicative AHP and SMART’

We are pleased to continue the open discussion in this journal and we hope that it will contribute to the clarification of the main issues. Aggregation by geometric means has been accepted as a technically sound procedure. The critical comments now seem to concentrate on the establishment of the Multiplicative AHP, the publication of a method for weighted voting before empirical verification, and the significance of negotiations in decision making. Several numerical examples illustrate the arithmetic-mean and geometric-mean calculations, and the legitimacy of rank reversal is revisited. We discuss the issues in the same order here. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Multi-Crit. Decis. Anal. 6 : 171–174 (1997) No. of Figures: 0. No. of Tables: 5. No. of References: 9.