Testing deterministic decision making axioms against experimental choice data sends the researcher down a path fraught with conceptual, methodological and computational pitfalls. Of over a hundred papers related to preference (in)transitivity, that we know, nearly every paper falls victim to at least one, and most fall victim to several critical problems. These problems cast doubt on the validity of their conclusions. We provide a status report of past and present efforts to test transitivity of preference and we discuss an approach that avoids the various problems of past work in this area. This work is supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under grant #FA 9550-05-1-0356 (PI:M.Regenwetter). |