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 123
- Downloads 0
Additivity dominance: Additivites are more potent and more often lexicalized across languages than are “subtractives”
Judgments of naturalness of foods tend to be more influenced by the process history of a food, rather than its actual constituents. Two types of processing of a “natural” food are to add something or to remove something....
Behind the veil of ignorance: Self-serving bias in climate change negotiations
Slowing climate change will almost certainly require a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, but agreement on who should reduce emissions by how much is difficult, in part because of the self-serving bias—the tendency t...
The wisdom of ignorant crowds: Predicting sport outcomes by mere recognition
The collective recognition heuristic is a simple forecasting heuristic that bets on the fact that people’s recognition knowledge of names is a proxy for their competitiveness: In sports, it predicts that the better-known...
On the descriptive value of loss aversion in decisions under risk: Six clarifications
Previous studies of loss aversion in decisions under risk have led to mixed results. Losses appear to loom larger than gains in some settings, but not in others. The current paper clarifies these results by highlighting...
A simple remedy for overprecision in judgment
Overprecision is the most robust type of overconfidence. We present a new method that significantly reduces this bias and offers insight into its underlying cause. In three experiments, overprecision was significantly re...