Decision-Making Paradoxes in Humans vs Machines: The case of the Allais and Ellsberg Paradoxes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Human decision-making is filled with a variety of paradoxes demonstrating deviations from rationality principles. Do state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) models also manifest these paradoxes when making decisions? As a case study, in this work we investigate whether GPT-4, a recently released state-of-the-art language model, would show two well-known paradoxes in human decision-making: the Allais paradox and the Ellsberg paradox. We demonstrate that GPT-4 succeeds in the two variants of the Allais paradox (the common-consequence effect and the common-ratio effect) but fails in the case of the Ellsberg paradox. We also show that providing GPT-4 with high-level normative principles allows it to succeed in the Ellsberg paradox, thus elevating GPT-4's decision-making rationality. We discuss the implications of our work for AI rationality enhancement and AI-assisted decision-making.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.019 | 0.046 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".