Designing for Deliberative Goal-Based Decision Making in Environments with Rare Adverse Events—An Experimental Study

The research was conducted when the first three authors worked at the Research Center Rationality in the Light of Experimental Economics at the University of Bonn. Funding by the Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste through the Academies’ Program of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities financed by the German federal government and the state governments is gratefully acknowledged. The experiment interface was programmed in JAVA employing the optimization software AMPL and KNITRO. The authors are grateful to Robert Fourer for valuable advice regarding their usage. All statistical analyses were performed using R (R Development Core Team 2011). The authors are also indebted to several colleagues who enabled them to run the experiments at their home universities, René Cyranek, Bernd Hellingrath, Martin Kocher, Christine Lauritzen, Brinja Meiseberg, and Christian Schade, and to the authors’ research assistants Felix Bürder, Jana Eraßmy, Markus Hertel, Jonas Klein, Rachid Rabah, and Philipp Rath for their excellent technical support. The paper greatly benefited from numerous discussions with Graham Sutherland and from criticism and suggestions from the editor and three anonymous referees.