Mind the gap? Description, experience, and the continuum of uncertainty in risky choice

The description-experience "gap" refers to the observation that choices are influenced by whether information about potential alternatives is learnt from a summary description or from the experience of sequentially sampling individual outcomes. In this chapter, we traverse the cognitive steps required to make a decision-information acquisition, storage, representation, and then choice-and at each step briefly review the evidence for sources of discrepancy between these two formats of choice. We conclude that description- and experience-based choice formats lie along a continuum of uncertainty and share important core features, including the explicit representation of probability, the combining of this probability information with outcome information, and utility maximization. The implication of this conclusion is that the differences between description- and experience-based choices emerge from how uncertainty information is acquired and stored rather than how it is represented or used.