The Influence Of Expectation On The Criticism Of Policymakers In Loss Situations

We make a lot of decisions everyday. Even we do not always pursuit the best decisions,we often seek satisfactory decisions.Individuals in the evaluation process of decision often encounter a negative emotion named regret. The number of decisions creates a lot of regret. In fact, regret is ubiquitous, and almost no one can avoid. Regret is a negative emotion. If a person can not get rid of regret, his health and heart will get hurt. Zeelenberg and Pieters(2007) proposed that decision makers should have some ways to guide their behaviors to medium their regret rather than to reject or suppress this experience.The purpose of this study is to find some reasonable ways to regulate the degree of regret.When Lin, Huang and Zeelenberg(2006) studied the factors that would affect regret,they found that the comparison between actual result and previous expectation would affect the degree of regret. The greater the difference between actual result and expectation is, the more intense the regret gets. Huang and Tseng(2007) in the regret study of multiple reference points also found that expectation influenced the evaluation of decision. They thought that expectation’s effect was neglected, and it was able to be an active means to alleviate the stress and pain associated with regret. As the empirical research in this area is relatively little, and most is correlation research, the purpose of this study is to use the method of story situation to test the relationship between expectation and investment regret and try to explore the effect of different types of expectation, and the reason why expectation will affect the regret.Experiment 1 uses single factor design to manipulate expectation’s level to make the final result beyond or under expectation. Also we have no expectation condition. We find the significant main effect of expectation. The regret in the beyond expectation condition is lower than in the regret of under expectation condition and in the no expectation condition.Experiment 2 divides the expectation into two categories, will expectation and should expectation. As will expectation is not higher than would expectation, we investigate the effects of different types of expectations to regret. It finds the regret in the beyond will expectation but under should expectation condition and beyond both expectations condition is significantly lower than regret in the no expectation condition and in the under both expectations condition. Experiment 3 is to explore the relationship between expectation and regret from counterfactual comparison perspective with a 2(expectation: beyond expectation vs under expectation) × 2(counterfactual comparison: probing vs no probing) two-factor design. The result shows that the main effect of expectation and counterfactual comparison is significant.Before controlling the counterfactual comparison, the regret of beyond expectationcondition is lower than the regret of under expectation condition. After probing, there is no significant difference between the regret of beyond expectation condition and the regret of under expectation condition. It means that the counterfactual comparison will affect the effect of expectation.The conclusions of this study are as follows:(1)Regret is reduced when expectation is satisfied.(2)Decision regret is reduced when the will expectation is satisfied even if the would expectation is not satisfied.(3)When expectation is satisfied, the subjects are less involved in the counterfactual comparison process.Then regret can be reduced.