On the importance of distinguishing between within- and between-subject effects in intransitive intertemporal choice

Most probabilistic paired comparison models treat inconsistent choices as caused by independent and random errors in the pairwise judgments. In this paper, we argue that this assumption is too restrictive for the analysis of paired comparison data obtained from multiple judges when transitivity violations are systematic. We present a new framework that contains the random error assumption as a special case but also allows for systematic changes in an option's utility assessments over the pairwise comparisons. Accounting for both between- and within-judge sources of variability, we demonstrate in an application on intertemporal choice that the proposed framework can capture systematic transitivity violations as well as individual taste differences.