A Study Of Framing Effect Of Risk Decision-Making Based On Protected Values

In 1981, Tversky & Kahneman firstly found the Framing Effect on "Asian disease problem", which shifts decision makers'preferences according to the way described in risk decision-making. The discovery of this phenomenon questioned the basic assumptions of "rational decision-makers" in standard decision theory and directly undermined the cornerstone of the establishment of expected utility theory. Because the invariance principle is one of the basic conditions of the standard normative decision theories, namely, the selection question to do the equivalent description should lead to identical preference order. As "Framing effect" was put forward, it is always being one of the focuses in risk decision-making theoretical and practical studies.The study based on the theory of protected values. According to the value of the contents in the task situation, the study divides the different task situations in framing effect studies into two categories:one category is the "property issue" involved the exchangeable values; the other category is the "human life issue", "animal life issue", "judicial investigation issue" involved protected values. The profit and loss values in the task situations are defined as the number of levels both 6 and 600. Using the between subjects design, this study carried out four framing effect experiments: "property issue", "human life issue", "animal life issue" and "judicial investigation issue" to systematically study the framing effect in different task situations with particular profit and loss values and get the following main conclusions:(1)In this study, the framing effect were not found in the four experiments including eight task conditions, but the subjects showed a more specific choice consistent tendency in a specific given task condition, which questions the universality of framing effect.(2)The different task situations involved particular nature content affected the subjects'decision-making. The division of the value of the content in different task situations, according to the theory of protected values, is reasonable. This study confirmed that when faced the exchangeable values-"property", the subjects were inclined to a conservative choice; when faced the protected values-"human and animal life", the choice of subjects tended to be neutral; when faced the protected value with strong degree of protection-"Rights Protection", the choice of subjects tended to take risks.(3)In this study, the framing effect were not found in four kinds of task situations with various profit and loss values, at the same time, this study verified that there was no framing effect in the particular task situation with small profit and loss value 6.(4) When the profit and loss value was smaller, the subjects were risky; when the profit and loss value was larger, the subjects were evasive. Profit and Loss value impacted the choice of the subjects, which had an interaction effect with the content of the situation. Only the content in some certain situations, the size of the profit and loss value could affect the results of the subjects'decision-making.