Replication: Revisiting Tversky and Shafir’s (1992) Disjunction Effect with an extension comparing between and within subject designs

• Published in: Journal of economic psychology Vol. 83; p. 102350
• Main Authors: Ziano, Ignazio, Kong, Man Fai, Kim, Hong Joo, Liu, Chit Yu, Wong, Sze Chai, Cheng, Bo Ley, Feldman, Gilad
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 01.03.2021
• Subjects: Between versus within subject design; Disjunction effect; Judgment and decision-making; Replication; Risk; Uncertainty; Replication; Risk; Uncertainty; Disjunction effect; Judgment and decision-making; Between versus within subject design
• ISSN: 0167-4870; 1872-7719
• DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2020.102350

Does uncertainty about an outcome influence decisions? The sure-thing principle (Savage, 1954) posits that it should not, but Tversky and Shafir (1992) found that people regularly violate it in hypothetical gambling and vacation decisions, a phenomenon they termed “disjunction effect”. Very close replications and extensions of Tversky and Shafir (1992) were conducted in this paper (N = 890, MTurk). The target article demonstrated the effect using two paradigms in a between-subject design: here, an extension also testing a within-subject design, with design being randomly assigned was added. These results were consistent with the original findings for the “paying to know“ problem (original: Cramer’s V = 0.22, 95% (CI) [0.14, 0.32]; replication: Cramer’s V = 0.30, 95% CI [0.24, 0.37]), yet not for the “choice under risk” problem (original: Cramer’s V = 0.26, 95% CI [0.14, 0.39]; replication: Cramer’s V = 0.11, 95% CI [−0.07, 0.20]). The within-subject extension showed very similar results. Implications for the disjunction effect and judgment and decision-making theory are discussed, and a call for improvements on the statistical understanding of comparisons of between-subject and within-subject designs is introduced. All materials, data, and code are available on https://osf.io/gu58m/.