The majority consensus in the empirical literature is that probability weighting functions are typically inverse-S shaped, that is, people tend to overweight small and underweight large probabilities. A separate stream of literature has reported event-splitting effects (also called violations of coalescing) and shown that they can explain violations of expected utility. This leads to the questions whether (1) the observed shape of weighting functions is a mere consequence of the coalesced presentation and, more generally, whether (2) preference elicitation should rely on presenting lotteries in a canonical split form instead of the commonly used coalesced form. We analyze data from a binary choice experiment where all lottery pairs are presented in both split and coalesced forms. Our results show that the presentation in a split form leads to a better fit of expected utility theory and to probability weighting functions that are closer to linear. We thus provide some evidence that the extent of probability weighting is not an ingrained feature, but rather a result of processing difficulties.

中文翻译：

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违反参数效用测量中的合并

经验文献中的大多数共识是，概率加权函数通常呈反S形，也就是说，人们倾向于偏重小概率而偏重大概率。另有文献报道了事件分割效应（也称为违反合并），并表明它们可以解释违反预期效用的情况。这引发了以下问题：（1）观察到的加权函数的形状仅仅是合并表示的结果，更一般而言，是否（2）偏好激发是否应该依靠规范拆分形式的彩票呈现，而不是通常使用的合并形成。我们分析来自二元选择实验的数据，其中所有彩票对均以拆分和合并形式呈现。我们的结果表明，采用拆分形式表示可以更好地拟合预期效用理论，并使概率加权函数更接近线性。因此，我们提供了一些证据，表明概率加权的程度不是根深蒂固的特征，而是处理困难的结果。