Classification: Social Sciences/Economic Sciences Tracking fairness considerations and choice procedures

Economists are becoming increasingly interested in the decision process involved in making a choice and not only in the actual choice made. The paper contributes to the understanding of the deliberation process in contexts of choice that involve fairness and uncertainty considerations. Eye movement patterns in choice problems where the deliberation process is easily discernable are used to understand the deliberation process in problems where it is less so. The first type of problem involves choosing from among two alternative distributions of income between the participant and another individual. Accumulated experimental results show that although many agents behave selfishly by maximizing their own payoff, many others make choices that are inconsistent with selfishness and can be only explained by fairness considerations. Based on eye movement patterns, we argue that even when participants make the selfish choice they have also taken into account fairness considerations. Furthermore, we classify participants according to their behavior in one problem in which one of the choices could only emerge from fairness considerations. We find that those who made the clearly fair choice have in general a stronger tendency to take into consideration the size of the payment to the other person. The second type of problem involves choice under uncertainty. In contrast to classical economic theory, the ey