Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Regret Theory (Loomes & Sugden, 1982) is a theory of decision making based on the idea that people consider not only outcome utility, but also future regret or rejoicing, which depends on both the chosen option and foregone options. Regret theory was originally proposed as a theory of choice under uncertainty. Here, we demonstrate that Regret Theory also predicts the widely studied attraction, compromise, and similarity context effects. First, we show that it predicts attraction effects in choice among gamble triples. Second, we apply Regret Theory to non-gamble multi-attribute choice settings and show that both predicts these context effects and predicts a within-subject dissociation between the compromise and similarity effects previously observed in empirical studies. Regret Theory provides a foundation for a unified account of risky and multi-attribute choice, and we believe the form we present here provides the simplest account to date that explains phenomena in both domains.