The competition focuses on the prediction of human choice among monetary gambles over time. The research of choice among gambles underlies both the foundations of rational economic theory (Bernoulli, 1954; Savage, 1954; Von Neumann & Morgenstern, 1944) and the analyses of robust deviations from rational choice (Allais, 1953; Ellsberg, 1961; Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). For example, it stands at the heart of the development of seminal decision theories, like expected utility theory and prospect theory. The large impact of this line of research reflects the assumption that choice and learning among gambles reveals basic features of human behavior in a wide set of situations. Thus, having good predictions of how people choose and learn between gambles can lead to important theoretical as well as practical developments.
The data used to train and test the predictive models of choice comes from the same experimental paradigm used in CPC15 (Erev et al., 2017). In this paradigm, decision makers are faced with descriptions of two monetary prospects and are asked to choose between them repeatedly for 25 trials. After each of the first five trials, decision makers do not receive feedback on their choice. After each trial thereafter (i.e. starting Trial 6), decision makers get full feedback concerning the outcomes generated by each option in that trial (both the obtained payoff and the forgone payoff are revealed).