RANDOMIZATION IN INDIVIDUAL CHOICE BEHAVIOR

There is ample evidence that people cannot generate random series when instructed to do so. Rather, they produce sequences with too few symm etries and long runs and too many alternations among events. The autho rs propose a psychological theory to account for these findings, which assumes that subjects generate nonrandom sequences that locally repre sent theoretical random series subject to a constraint on their short- term memory. Closed-form expressions are then derived for the major st atistics that have been used to test for deviations from randomness. R esults from 3 experiments with 2 and 3 equiprobable alternatives suppo rt the model on both the individual and group levels.