Object Representation in Multiattribute Choice:
1. What is the rationale of not showing attributes in the choice setting? It seems to
violate the ecological validity that the paper pursues.
2. To what extent can we regard prediction accuracy as resulting from a closer
analogy between machine algorithm and human decision rule? (From a pure
algorithmic perspective, models with hidden layers out performs models without
hidden layers by construction.) It may make sense to run a follow-up survey that
solicits hidden attributes people usually think about when buying the books, and
compare them with the “hidden attributes” predicted by the model.
Money Buys Happiness When Spending Fits Our Personality
1. How should we interpret the results? The casual argument is that if the products
bought reflects the personality that the society predicts, then such purchase is
conducive to happiness. So the underlying mechanism can be either of the two:
(a) consumption of products that fits into impression given to others promotes
happiness, maybe due to the fact that coherent impression facilitates social
interaction. This is a social influence story. (b) consumption “type” reflects the
“identity” or “personality” that a consumer wants to achieve. The discrepancy
between personality that a product reflects and the consumer’s current
personality thus reflects a distance between the current self and the desired self;
the larger the distance, the lower life satisfaction can be.
Coherency-maximizing exploration in the supermarket
1. Can the empirical pattern be explained by imperfect information and the incentive
of learning?
Coherency maximization implies a positive state dependence between previous
and current consumption, i.e. a component in the realized utility function. An
alternative story is that consumers do not necessarily get more utility from
consuming the same product as the previous period; rather, characterizing
product switching as a search process, each new product that a consumer
decides to stick to should give him/her a higher utility as compared to the
previous one. If the market is stable (i.e. expected value of the rest of the
products are constant over time), it implies as sampling experience accumulates,
the likelihood that a new product exceeds the current one becomes lower. So the
empirical pattern is also consistent with an informational account.
2. Is it possible to design experiments to distinguish these two accounts by
changing the information environment exogenously?