Evaluating the coherence of Take-the-best in structured environments
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2012, Vol 7, Issue 4
Abstract
Heuristic decision-making models, like Take-the-best, rely on environmental regularities. They conduct a limited search, and ignore available information, by assuming there is structure in the decision-making environment. Take-the-best relies on at least two regularities: diminishing returns, which says that information found earlier in search is more important than information found later; and correlated information, which says that information found early in search is predictive of information found later. We develop new approaches to determining search orders, and to measuring cue discriminability, that make the reliance of Take-the-best on these regularities clear, and open to manipulation. We then demonstrate, in the well-studied German cities environment, and three new city environments, when and how these regularities support Take-the-best. To do this, we focus not on the accuracy of Take-the-best, as most previous studies have, but on a measure of its coherence as a decision-making process. In particular, we consider whether Take-the-best decisions, based on a single piece of information, can be justified because an exhaustive search for information is unlikely to yield a different decision. Using this measure, we show that when the two environmental regularities are present, the decisions made by limited search are unlikely to have changed after exhaustive search, but that both regularities are often necessary.
Authors and Affiliations
Michael D. Lee and Shunan Zhang
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP677896
- DOI -
- Views 112
- Downloads 0
Descriptive norms for me, injunctive norms for you: Using norms to explain the risk gap
People are more likely to rely on descriptive norms (i.e., what their peers are doing) when deciding whether to take a risk themselves than when deciding whether to recommend others to take a risk. We proposed and found...
Psychometric characteristics of two forms of the Slovak version of the Indecisiveness Scale
The study investigates the psychometric characteristics of the Slovak version of the original and short form of the Indecisiveness Scale on three samples of university students and one general population sample. An explo...
Does moving from war zone change emotions and risk perceptions? A field study of Israeli students
The current field study uses data collected after the 2009 war between Israel and the Hamas militias in the Gaza Strip ended. The study compares recalled emotions and perceived risks among two groups of students, all of...
Trust and self-control: The moderating role of the default
According to recent dual-process theories, interpersonal trust is influenced by both impulsive and deliberative processes. The present research explores the determinants of deliberative trust, investigating how trust dec...
Hold on to it? An experimental analysis of the disposition effect
This paper experimentally investigates a well-known anomaly in portfolio management, i.e., the fact that paper losses are realized less than paper gains (disposition effect). I confirm the existence of the disposition ef...