title: The long and short of it: closing the description-experience "gap" by taking the long-run view.
abstract: Previous research has shown that many choice biases are attenuated when short-run decisions are reframed to the long run. However, this literature has been limited to description-based choice tasks in which possible outcomes and their probabilities are explicitly specified. A recent literature has emerged showing that many core results found using the description paradigm do not generalize to experience-based choice tasks in which possible outcomes and their probabilities are learned from sequential sampling. In the current study, we investigated whether this description-experience choice gap occurs in the long run. We examined description- and experience-based preferences under two traditional short run framed choice tasks (single-play, repeated-play) and also a long-run frame (multi-play). We found a reduction in the size of the description-experience gap in the long-run frame, which was attributable to greater choice maximizing in the description format and reduced underweighting [corrected] of rare events in the experience format. We interpret these results as a "broad bracketing" effect: the long-run mindset attenuates short-run biases such as loss aversion and reliance on small samples.
authors.affiliation: Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, 100 Fuqua Drive, Durham, NC 27708-0120, USA. adrian.camilleri@duke.edu
authors.forename: Adrian R
authors.initials: AR
authors.lastname: Camilleri
authors.forename: Ben R
authors.initials: BR
authors.lastname: Newell
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002755:Choice Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D004522:Educational Status; D005260:Female; D005715:Gambling / Q000523:psychology; D005717:Games, Experimental; D006801:Humans; D007182:Income; D008297:Male; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D012309:Risk-Taking