title: Age differences in trade-off decisions: older adults prefer choice deferral.
abstract: Our primary purpose in this study was to examine age differences in using choice deferral when young and older adults made trade-off decisions. Ninety-two young and 92 older adults were asked to make a trade-off decision among four cars or to use choice deferral (i.e., not buy any of these cars and keep looking for other cars). High and low emotional trade-off difficulty were manipulated between participants through different attribute labels of available cars. Older adults were more likely than young adults to choose deferral. Older adults who used deferral reported less retrospective negative emotion than those who did not.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH 43403, USA. ywchen@bgsu.edu
authors.forename: Yiwei
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Xiaodong
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Ma
authors.forename: Olivia
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Pethtel
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D002755:Choice Behavior; D003657:Decision Making; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D012201:Reward; D013997:Time Factors; D055815:Young Adult