Decision making in dynamic task environments

Abstract

Two decades of process tracing studies have provided one robust conclusion: there is no generally used strategy for a particular choice problem, but the selected strategy is highly contingent upon various task and context factors, such as complexity or time pressure (see, for a review, Ford et al., 1989). Recently, Payne et al. (1993) added a further dimension to this conclusion by suggesting that strategy selection is not only contingent but also highly adaptive. They based their conclusion on a comparison of the strategies that subjects selected in various task contexts and the outcomes of simulations in which both effort and accuracy were taken into account. Generally, subjects appeared to select a decision strategy that saves considerable effort at the expense of only a small decline in accuracy.