4. Psychology of Preference Reversals and Prominence Hypothesis

Chapter 3 introduced the experimental research of Tversky et al. (1990), arguing that the preference reversal phenomenon can be interpreted as a deviation from procedural invariance. A deviation from procedural invariance refers to a trait by which preference is reversed by preference revelation procedures. Tversky et al. asserted that the preference reversal phenomenon was explainable by partial modification of expected utility theory such as transitivity and independence axiom. This chapter will describe the prominence hypothesis as a psychological interpretation of this phenomenon and the contingent-weighting model (Tversky et al. 1988; Slovic et al. 1990) of the specific representation of the hypothesis and introduce some experiments related to the model.