Rubinstein2005-page22 - 12:18 4 master Sheet number 20 Page...

October 21, 2005 12:18 master Sheet number 20 Page number 4
4 Lecture One
in their responses, people are embarrassed and want to change their
answers.
Before the lecture, students in Tel Aviv had to Fll out a question-
naire similar to Q regarding a set X that contains nine alternatives,
each specifying the following four characteristics of a travel pack-
age: location (Paris or Rome), price, quality of the food, and quality
of the lodgings. The questionnaire included only thirty six ques-
tions since for each pair of alternatives x and y , only one of the
questions, Q ( x , y ) or Q ( y , x ) , was randomly selected to appear in the
questionnaire (thus the dependence on order of an individual’s re-
sponse could not be checked within the experimental framework).
In the 2004 group, out of eighteen MA students, only two had no
intransitivities in their answers, and the average number of triples
in which intransitivity existed was almost nine. Many of the viola-
tions of transitivity involved two alternatives that were actually the