Transaction analysis: A framework and an application to insurance decisions

Creating or interpreting people's choices requires attention to a great many details. A framework initially presented in this journal (Fischhoff and Furby, 1988) specifies those details. It is applied here to several insurance-related choices appearing in Johnson et al. (1993) and elsewhere. These specific applications suggest alternative explanations for the results of these studies. The approach as a whole provides an alternative perspective regarding reliance on experiments and markets to study people's preferences.