This paper is now published in the Journal of Economics and Statistics.

Abstract

A growing literature has shown that people sometimes prefer to randomize between two options. We investigate how prevalent this behavior is in an experiment using a novel and simple method. Subjects face a list of questions in which one of the alternatives is fixed and the other varies, like a Multiple Price List, but in each row they can randomize between the options. We find that the majority of subjects chose to randomize in the majority of questions, and notably, they did so for ranges of values that were “very large.”