Previous research has demonstrated systematic discrepancies between description-and experience-based risky choices. This description-experiencegap has been attributed to several factors such as reliance onsmall samples and differential probability weighting patterns. Becausecontext-dependent outcome expectation regarding safe options might influenceexperience-based risky choices, it constitutes another potential contributor tothe gap. Using a free-sampling paradigm and risky options with rare outcomesthat were either attractive or unattractive relative to the frequent ones, twoexperiments examined the existence and impact of such outcome expectation inexperience-based risky choices. Both experiments had two information conditions:hint information meant to eliminate outcome expectation was provided in onecondition but not the other. Experiment 1, which indicated the numbers ofpossible outcomes regarding both safe and risky options under the hintcondition, revealed different choice behaviors regarding risky-safe trialsbetween the two information conditions, no matter whether the rare outcome ofthe risky option in such a trial (i.e., the local context) wasattractive or unattractive. However, this result provided only indirect evidencefor the role of outcome expectation because it was unclear whether the hintinformation affected only the outcome expectation and thus evaluation of safeoptions or the evaluations of both safe and risky ones. With refined hintinformation arguably removing potential impacts on the evaluation of riskyoptions, Experiment 2 showed that expectation of a non-existent rare outcome ofsafe options did contribute to experience-based risky choices. In addition, itappeared that the rare outcomes of the risky options in other decision problemspresented in the same experiment (i.e., the global context)also affected outcome expectation. Future research could investigate how theinteraction between local and global contexts determines outcome expectation todeepen our understanding of its contribution to experience-based risky choiceand the description-experience gap.
