Revisiting prospect theory and the newsvendor problem

Many experimental studies have demonstrated that human decision-makers exhibit the pull-to-center effect in newsvendor decision. It has been shown in the literature that prospect theory with a decision-dependent reference point can predict the pull-to-center effect for the newsvendor problem by assuming a uniform distribution of demand. In this paper, we prove this result for a general case: prospect theory with a decision-independent reference point can predict the pull-to-center effect for the newsvendor problem with a general distribution of demand.