Abstract

The economics approach to decision making assumes that preferences are stable and retrieved from a master list stored in memory. According to Behavioral decision research, a psychological approach, there is a general consensus toward the idea that preferences are constructed and determined by a contingent evaluation of context and task variables. A lot of the evidence for adaptive behavior and preference construction shed lights on people's tendency to adopt available anchors, that inherently favor relative rather than absolute evaluations. The adoption of rather unusual experimental task, however, have led researchers both to demonstrations of constructive preference and toward unqualified conclusions of actual behavior. Psychologists and economists have different perspectives about human preferences but they both need to put more psychological realism into experiments to generalize their results.