研究组合风险下的决策行为,发现人们依赖关键特征而非精确计算。
Decision-Making under Combinatorial Risk

- 用投资分配任务模拟组合风险,通过提升成功率重塑结果分布。
- 偏好概率增量大的选项,增量相同时选初始成功率高的。
- 显示完整概率分布后行为更理性,说明直观特征主导决策。
在组合风险下,风险来自多个不确定因素的共同作用,导致结果分布需由决策者推导且计算成本高。本文设计了一种投资分配任务,参与者通过投资提升各组件的成功率,从而改变最终结果分布。实验发现,人们倾向于选择概率提升幅度更大的选项,当提升幅度相同时,则偏好初始成功率更高的选项。当完整展示诱导出的概率质量函数(PMF)后,行为发生显著变化:对组合风险特征的敏感性下降,选择方差减小。为解释这些模式,我们采用符号回归发现简洁的描述模型,其核心依赖于投资后的成功率等组合风险特征,而非精确计算完整分布。进一步通过前景理论残差模型可较好拟合显示PMF后的行为。结果表明,人类在组合风险中主要依靠核心特征进行判断,仅在显示完整分布时才转向精细评估。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Decision-making under risk is typically studied through single-shot lottery choices. Yet many real decisions involve combinatorial risk, where risk arises from multiple risky components, so the lottery over outcomes is induced rather than given outright and can be costly to evaluate exactly. We introduce an investment-allocation task to study decision under combinatorial risk, where investing in a component raises its success probability and thereby reshapes the outcome distribution. Participants favor the option with the larger probability increment, and, when increments are equal, the option with the higher initial success probability. Revealing the induced probability mass function (PMF) substantially changes behavior, making participants less responsive to combinatorial-risk features and reducing choice variance. To explain these patterns, we move beyond standard benchmarks and hand-crafted hypotheses with symbolic regression to discover compact descriptive models. The discovered models rely mainly on combinatorial-risk features, such as the after-investment success probability, rather than exact evaluation of the full induced distribution. Behavior under the displayed PMF is then well explained by augmenting this model with a prospect-theoretic residual model. The results show that people navigate combinatorial risk primarily through its core features, shifting toward lottery valuation only when the induced PMF is displayed.
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