A basic issue in social influence is how best to change one’s judgment in response to learning the opinions of others. This article examines the strategies that people use to revise their quantitative estimates on the basis of the estimates of another person. The authors note that people tend to use 2 basic strategies when revising estimates: choosing between the 2 estimates and averaging them. The authors developed the probability, accuracy, redundancy (PAR) model to examine the relative effectiveness of these two strategies across judgment environments. A surprising result was that averaging was the more effective strategy across a wide range of commonly encountered environments. The authors observed that despite this finding, people tend to favor the choosing strategy. Most participants in these studies would have achieved greater accuracy had they always averaged. The identification of intuitive strategies, along with a formal analysis of when they are accurate, provides a basis for examining how effectively people use the judgments of others. Although a portfolio of strategies that includes averaging and choosing can be highly effective, the authors argue that people are not generally well adapted to the environment in terms of strategy selection.

The current work takes a general perspective on the role of time in decision making. There are many different relationships and interactions between time and decision making, and no single summary can do justice to this topic. In this paper we will describe a few of the aspects in which time and decision making are interleaved: (a) temporal perspectives of decisions the various temporal orientations that decision-makers may adopt while making decisions, and the impact of such temporal orientations on the decision process and its outcomes; (b) time as a medium within which decisions take place the nature of decision processes that occur along time; (c) time as a resource and as a contextual factor the implications of shortage in time resources and the impact of time limits on decision making processes and performance; (d) time as a commodity time as the subject matter of decision making. The paper ends with a few general questions on the role of duration in decision making. <3 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

This paper begins to answer the call to broaden current theories of individual decision-making by including in them the effects of human mood. Grounding our arguments in psychological literature on the effects of mood on information processing, motivation, and decision heuristics, we develop hypotheses about how mood can significantly affect individuals' use of structured decision protocols. In support of our hypotheses, results from an experimental study of complex decision-making suggest that, in situations where a structured decision protocol is the usual method of decision-making, individuals in moderately negative moods are significantly more likely than those in moderately positive moods to: (1) carefully execute all the steps of a structured decision protocol, (2) execute the steps of a structured decision protocol in the correct order, and (3) rely on the outcome of the structured decision protocol as the primary basis for the decision. We discuss these findings in terms of the...

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Abstract-- This paper proposes a decision-aid tool, denominated reasoning map. It is a model that depicts the means available for a decision-maker connected with the ends that he/she is pursuing. Reasoning maps can be used to help the construction (structuring) of a decision-maker’s problem, and to support the exploring (assessment) of the influence that the adoption of a given decision alternative generates on the achievement of his/her values. Its modelling rules take into account explicitly the cognitive limitations that an individual has in providing information about his/her preferences and perceptions. A case study, where a reasoning map was used to provide decision aid in a real-world problem, illustrates the method in practice. Index Terms — ideographic causal map, decision aid, qualitative decision analysis, fuzzy cognitive map. I I.

As you walk down a supermarket aisle, you pass an end-of-aisle display of canned tomato soup. There is a sign on the display that says “Limit 12 per customer. ” Would such a sign possibly influence the number of cans that you would buy? Would you buy more cans than if the sign said “No limit per customer? ” Our intuitions say no, but empirical evidence says that purchase behaviors are influenced by such a sign (Wansink, Kent and Hoch, 1998). Consider another example: A wheel of fortune is spun and stops at the number 65. You are then asked if the percentage of African countries in the United Nations is above or below that number. Could this exercise actually influence your estimate of the percentage? Although it may seem unlikely, the evidence is that such anchors have an effect: In fact, groups who received larger numbers determined by a wheel of fortune gave higher estimates than groups who received lower numbers, demonstrating that irrelevant anchors influenced these estimates (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). “Anchoring and adjustment ” is one of three well-known heuristics described by Tversky and Kahneman (1974) in a classic paper that also described the representativeness and availability heuristics. Like the other heuristics, anchoring and adjustment can be a useful way of making judgments. Imagine that you are trying to set a value on an antique chair that you have inherited