Contextual deliberation and the choice-valuation preference reversal

Revealed preferences between lotteries can be asymmetrically reversed across choice and valuation. The ongoing debate is whether the procedure-invariance principle is violated. This research presents a parsimonious theory to reconcile asymmetric preference reversals with procedure invariance. When risk attitude is ex ante imperfectly known, preference-eliciting procedures can endogenously influence revealed preferences through affecting the incentive for information retrieval/acquisition (i.e., deliberation). As predicted, when lottery pairing was known, experiment participants exhibited substantially less asymmetric reversals by stating mean-preserving and more dispersed valuations. Therefore, the endogeneity of asymmetric preference reversals can be substantiated. (c) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).