A Comparison of Regret Theory and Salience Theory for Decisions under Risk

Two non-transitive theories to model decision making under risk are regret theory (Loomes and Sugden, 1982, 1987) and salience theory (Bordalo, Gennaioli, and Shleifer, 2012). While the psychological underpinning of these two approaches is different, the models share the assumption that within-state comparisons of outcomes across choice options are a key determinant of choice behavior. We investigate the overlap between these theories and show that original regret theory (Loomes and Sugden, 1982) is a special case of salience theory (Bordalo, Gennaioli, and Shleifer, 2012), which itself is a special case of generalized regret theory (Loomes and Sugden, 1987).