Response Time and Utility

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider situations in which utilities are not observed, but rather inferred from revealed preferences: meaning they are inferred from subjects' choices, and they give conditions on the data that characterize the property that response time is a monotonic function of utility differences.

Abstract: Response time is the time an agent needs to make a decision. One fundamental finding in psychology and neuroscience is that, in a binary choice, there is a monotonic relationship between the response time and the difference between the utilities of the two options. We consider situations in which utilities are not observed, but rather inferred from revealed preferences: meaning they are inferred from subjects’ choices. Given data on subjects’ choices, and the time to make those choices, we give conditions on the data that characterize the property that response time is a monotonic function of utility differences.