Two scenario studies investigated the impact of the investment of instrumental and noninstrumental effort on the intensity of disappointment and regret. The role of effort was investigated in the context of other determinants of disappointment and regret: the desirability of the outcome, its likelihood, and the perceived responsibility for (not) obtaining the outcome. Study 1 shows that after f...

The current work explored the relations among reactance, regret, and behavioral choice. A possible mechanism for reactance in opposition to persuasion attempts involves people anticipating greater regret for negative outcomes after complying with an agent of persuasion than for negative outcomes after reacting against an agent of persuasion. Some participants were asked to anticipate regret pri...

Although regret is assumed to facilitate good decision making, there is little research directly addressing this assumption. Four experiments (N = 326) examined the relation between children's ability to experience regret and the quality of their subsequent decision making. In Experiment 1 regret and adaptive decision making showed the same developmental profile, with both first appearing at ab...

We investigate the effect of regret-related feedback information on bidding behavior in sealed-bid first-price auctions. Two types of regret are possible in this auction format. A winner of the auction may regret paying too much relative to the second highest bid, and a loser may regret missing an opportunity to win at a favorable price. In theory, under very general conditions, being sensitive...

This paper studies a variety of forms of regret minimization as the criteria with which traders choose their bids/asks in a double auction. Unlike the expected utility maximizers that populate typical market models, these traders do not determine their actions using a single prior. The analysis proves that minimax regret traders will not converge to price-taking as the number of traders in the ...

The purpose of this study was to explore cultural similarities and differences in regret, focusing on distinctions between interpersonal and self-situations, and between action and inaction regrets. Japanese and American undergraduates were asked to describe regrets experienced in interpersonal and self-situations. We found that both situational and cultural contexts influenced the likelihood o...

Counterfactual Regret Minimization (CFR) is an efficient no-regret learning algorithm for decision problems modeled as extensive games. CFR’s regret bounds depend on the requirement of perfect recall: players always remember information that was revealed to them and the order in which it was revealed. In games without perfect recall, however, CFR’s guarantees do not apply. In this paper, we pre...

This paper investigates, for the first time in the literature, the approximation of minmax (regret) versions of classical problems like shortest path, minimum spanning tree, and knapsack. For a constant number of scenarios, we establish fully polynomial-time approximation schemes for the min-max versions of these problems, using relationships between multi-objective and min-max optimization. Us...

We consider an Arrow-Debreu economy in which expected-utility-maximizing agents are sensitive to regret. According to regret theory, the marginal utility of their consumption is increasing in the maximum payoff that they could have obtained if they would have made another choice ex ante. We show that regret biases the optimal portfolio allocation towards assets that perform particularly well in...