A note on negativity bias and framing response asymmetry

An “unprocessed risk” is a collection of simple lotteries with a reduction-rule that describes the actual-payoff to the decision-maker as a function of realized lottery outcomes. Experiments reveal that the willingness to pay for unprocessed risks is consistently biased toward the payoff-level in the unprocessed representation. The “anchoring-to-frame” bias in cases of positive framing is significantly weaker than in cases of negative framing suggesting that rational “negativity bias” may reflect in asymmetric violations of rationality.