In a classic paper, Tversky (1969) reported that some participants violated transitivity systematically when choosing between specially constructed gambles. These violations were interpreted as the result of a lexicographic semiorder model for choice. Recently, a variant of the lexicographic semiorder known as the priority heuristic has been proposed as a descriptive model of choices between risky gambles by Brandstaetter, Gigerenzer, and Hertwig (2006). This paper will present empirical tests of transitivity in fifty individuals using three designs intended to test for systematic violations of transitivity predicted by the priority heuristic and related lexicographic models. Results show that the data of the vast majority of participants could be described with transitive orders, and that a few participants switched between different transitive orders during the course of the experiment. No individual was observed whose choices were mostly consistent with the priority heuristic (PH), nor were the data of any person convincingly intransitive. The majority of individuals showed systematic violations of cumulative prospect theory (CPT) and expected utility (EU) such as systematic violations of stochastic dominance. A special case of the transfer of attention exchange (TAX) model provided a better fit to individual data than did PH, CPT or EU for the majority of individuals. |