Testing Probabilistic Models of Choice using Column Generation.

Bart Smeulders, Clintin Davis-Stober, Michel Regenwetter, Frits C R Spieksma
Author Information
  1. Bart Smeulders: HEC Management School, University of Liège, 4000 Liège, Belgium.
  2. Clintin Davis-Stober: Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri, 219 McAlester Hall, Columbia, MO 65211, USA.
  3. Michel Regenwetter: Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 603 E. Daniel St., Champaign, IL 61820, USA.
  4. Frits C R Spieksma: Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, TU Eindhoven, 5600 MB Eindhoven, the Netherlands.

Abstract

In so-called random preference models of probabilistic choice, a decision maker chooses according to an unspecified probability distribution over preference states. The most prominent case arises when preference states are linear orders or weak orders of the choice alternatives. The literature has documented that actually evaluating whether decision makers' observed choices are consistent with such a probabilistic model of choice poses computational difficulties. This severely limits the possible scale of empirical work in behavioral economics and related disciplines. We propose a family of column generation based algorithms for performing such tests. We evaluate our algorithms on various sets of instances. We observe substantial improvements in computation time and conclude that we can efficiently test substantially larger data sets than previously possible.

Keywords

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Grants

  1. K25 AA024182/NIAAA NIH HHS

Word Cloud

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