“Categorisation of decision situations affecting induced preferences.
Some empirical tests of a formal framing model.”

Framing theory is a sociological theory of individual decision making that postulates an intervening stage of cognitive categorisation of the decision situation in terms of ‘social meaning’ before preferences are formed - this way rendering the utility concept more fruitful for applications in sociology. In the presentation, I argue that some well-known anomalies of axiomatic utility theory can be explained in this light. For illustration, I focus on phenomena of context-dependent preferences documented by TVERSKY & SIMONSON roughly a decade ago. I present analyses of own empirical studies in order to validate this claim.

The presentation was held at the SFB 504 at Mannheim University on February 2nd, 2004. It is based on excerpts of Chapters 2, 4 and 7 of my dissertation.

view slideshow (510 KB)

download slides as PDF (211 KB)