Choice Bracketing revisited: Replication and extensions Registered Report of seven experiments reviewed in Read et...

Choice partitioning refers to the phenomenon when the same choice set yields different decision-making behaviour when they are grouped into sets (broadly bracketed) or evaluated separately (narrowly bracketed). In a Registered Report experiment with a US sample recruited online through Prolific (N = 896), we conducted a replication of seven studies reviewed in Read et al. (Read et al. 1999 J. Risk Uncertain. 19, 99 (doi:10.1023/A:1007879411489)). We concluded a mostly successful replication: out of the seven studies, we found support for six (Studies 1, 3, 4 and 6: Cramer's V > 0.31; Studies 2 and 7: Cohen's d > 0.29) and no empirical support for one (Study 5: Cramer's V = 0.02). Extending the replication, we added new conditions in Studies 6 and 7, further expanding the manipulation's scope range, yet failed to find any impact. In our replication, we came across many challenges, both conceptual and empirical, and we therefore call bracketing scholars to better define bracketing in relation to other phenomena in decision-making (joint versus separate mode, framing effects, mental accounting, etc.), with falsifiable hypotheses, examining overlap with other constructs, and clearer mapping between theory and empirics. Materials, data and code are available on: https://osf.io/vdqek/.