Foregone with the Wind: Indirect Payoff Information and its Implications for Choice

Examination of the effect of information concerning foregone payoffs on choice behavior reveals a complex pattern. Depending on the environment, this information can facilitate or impair maximization. Our study of nine experimental tasks suggests that the complex pattern can be summarized with the assumption that initially people tend to be highly sensitive, and sometimes too sensitive, to recent foregone payoffs. However, over time, people can learn to adjust their sensitivity depending on the environment they are facing. The implications of this observation tomodels of human adaptation and to problems of mechanism design are discussed.