A Tailor-Made Test of Intransitive Choice

We performed a new test of intransitive choice based on individual measurements of regret theory, the most influential intransitive theory. Our test is tailor-made and, therefore, more likely to detect violations of transitivity than previous tests. In spite of this, we observed only few cycles and we could not reject the hypothesis that they were due to random error. Moreover, there was little evidence that regret affected people’s choices. A possible explanation for the poor predictive performance of regret theory is that, unlike other non-expected utility models, it assumes that preferences are separable over states of nature. Our data suggest that to account for the violations of expected utility event-separability has to be relaxed.