Revealing Choice Bracketing

Experiments suggest that people fail to take into account interdependencies between their choices — they do not broadly bracket. Researchers often instead assume that people narrowly bracket, but existing designs do not test it. We design a novel experiment and revealed preference tests for how someone brackets their choices. In portfolio allocation under risk, social allocation, and induced-value shopping experiments, 40-43% of subjects are consistent with narrow bracketing and 0-16% with broad bracketing. Adjusting for each model’s predictive precision, 74% of subjects are best described by narrow bracketing, 13% by broad bracketing, and 6% by intermediate cases.

Andrew Ellis, David J. Freeman