Information search patterns in risky versus intertemporal choice: Tests across contexts of common and distinct behavioral anomalies.

Understanding how people make decisions across various contexts is at the core of theoretical and applied work in behavioral decision research. In this study, we investigate how process tracing contributes to the understanding of common and distinct processes underlying risky and intertemporal choices in three eye-tracking experiments. Experiment 1 elicited behavioral patterns that were interpreted as supporting a common mechanism (i.e., the common ratio effect in risky choice and the common difference effect in intertemporal choice). In contrast, Experiment 2 elicited behavioral patterns that challenge this unified perspective (i.e., the peanuts effect in risky choice and the magnitude effect in intertemporal choice). Experiment 3 elicited both sets of behavioral anomalies and varied the display format of choice options, testing the generalizability and variability of information search patterns across different contexts. The results suggest that people not only exhibit distinct behavioral anomalies but also engage in different information search patterns in risky versus intertemporal choice. Furthermore, information search patterns, as well as the between-task differences thereof, appeared to be sensitive to stimulus designs and display formats. In so doing, we provide a process-level framework to test the common and distinct cognitive processes underlying different choice tasks across different decision contexts.