THE ROLE OF TASK AND CONTEXT IN PREFERENCE MEASUREMENT

Abstract— The present studies show that preferences change systematically depending on the global context and the measurement task Subjects evaluated apartments described by monthly rent and distance to campus using two different tasks (choices and attractiveness ratings) in two different global contexts (one with a narrow range of rents and a wide range of distances, and the other with a wide range of rents and a narrow range of distances) With the task held constant, preference orders for the same pair of apartments reversed in the two different contexts Similarly, with the context held constant, preference orders for the same pair of apartments reversed in the two tasks Taken together, the effects are startling Out of 25 apartments common to all four conditions, the preference rank of the apartment that was most expensive and closest to campus ranged from the 28th percentile to the 80th percentile We argue that, in the present experiments, the global context influences the scale values (or the perceptions of the attributes), and the task influences the weights (or the psychological importance) of the attributes.