A model of decision making under alcohol intoxication

We present a new model of decision making under alcohol intoxication. The scope of the model covers binary choice, where choice alternatives are allowed to have any (finite) number of attributes. The acute effects of alcohol intoxication on decision making are accounted for by two parameters, one governing increased choice inconsistency due to “noisier" cognitive representations of the choice attributes, the other governing how attention to choice attributes changes, accounting for the well-known alcohol myopia effect. We demonstrate how our model can account for a variety of alcohol impaired decisions across many different contexts (e.g., decisions to drink and drive, sexual decisions) and be applied using various methodological approaches (e.g., cognitive neuroscience, ecological momentary assessment). We show that our model contains a standard model of multi-attribute decision making, the probit random utility model, as a special case when the alcohol-impairment parameters are set equal to values corresponding to no alcohol impairment.