Understanding the use of non-compensatory decision rules in discrete choice experiments: The role of emotions

When making choices, individuals can follow alternative strategies or decision rules to the traditional compensatory utility maximization, raising doubts about to what extent these choices can be used to elicit preferences. In this paper we use a verbal protocol approach to investigate the use of alternative decision rules in discrete choice experiments. The main interest is to identify some of the determinants of the context that play a role in the choice of a specific strategy or decision rule. Our results show that emotions can partially explain this choice among compensatory and simpler non-compensatory decision rules. We also find that the number of years of education - and not personal income - are positively correlated with the probability of choosing a non-compensatory decision rules. Finally, by manipulating alternative specific emotions (sadness, disgust) we find that emotions of the same valence can have opposing causal effects on the decision rule choice. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.