Decision Errors (decision + error)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Focusing failures in competitive environments: explaining decision errors in the Monty Hall game, the Acquiring a Company problem, and multiparty ultimatums

JOURNAL OF BEHAVIORAL DECISION MAKING, Issue 5 2003
Avishalom Tor
Abstract This paper offers a unifying conceptual explanation for failures in competitive decision making across three seemingly unrelated tasks: the Monty Hall game (Nalebuff, 1987), the Acquiring a Company problem (Samuelson & Bazerman, 1985), and multiparty ultimatums (Messick, Moore, & Bazerman, 1997). We argue that the failures observed in these three tasks have a common root. Specifically, due to a limited focus of attention, competitive decision makers fail properly to consider all of the information needed to solve the problem correctly. Using protocol analyses, we show that competitive decision makers tend to focus on their own goals, often to the exclusion of the decisions of the other parties, the rules of the game, and the interaction among the parties in light of these rules. In addition, we show that the failure to consider these effects explains common decision failures across all three games. Finally, we suggest that this systematic focusing error in competitive contexts can serve to explain and improve our understanding of many additional, seemingly disparate, competitive decision-making failures. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Taking stock of naturalistic decision making

JOURNAL OF BEHAVIORAL DECISION MAKING, Issue 5 2001
Raanan Lipshitz
Abstract We review the progress of naturalistic decision making (NDM) in the decade since the first conference on the subject in 1989. After setting out a brief history of NDM we identify its essential characteristics and consider five of its main contributions: recognition-primed decisions, coping with uncertainty, team decision making, decision errors, and methodology. NDM helped identify important areas of inquiry previously neglected (e.g. the use of expertise in sizing up situations and generating options), it introduced new models, conceptualizations, and methods, and recruited applied investigators into the field. Above all, NDM contributed a new perspective on how decisions (broadly defined as committing oneself to a certain course of action) are made. NDM still faces significant challenges, including improvement of the quantity and rigor of its empirical research, and confirming the validity of its prescriptive models. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


FUTURES MARKETS AND BUBBLE FORMATION IN EXPERIMENTAL ASSET MARKETS*

PACIFIC ECONOMIC REVIEW, Issue 2 2006
Charles Noussair
In addition to a spot market, there are futures markets in operation, one maturing at the beginning of each period of the life of the asset. We find that when futures markets are present, bubbles do not occur in the spot markets. The futures markets seem to reduce the speculation and the decision errors that appear to give rise to price bubbles in experimental asset markets. [source]


A simple two-stage model predicts response time distributions

THE JOURNAL OF PHYSIOLOGY, Issue 16 2009
R. H. S. Carpenter
The neural mechanisms underlying reaction times have previously been modelled in two distinct ways. When stimuli are hard to detect, response time tends to follow a random-walk model that integrates noisy sensory signals. But studies investigating the influence of higher-level factors such as prior probability and response urgency typically use highly detectable targets, and response times then usually correspond to a linear rise-to-threshold mechanism. Here we show that a model incorporating both types of element in series , a detector integrating noisy afferent signals, followed by a linear rise-to-threshold performing decision , successfully predicts not only mean response times but, much more stringently, the observed distribution of these times and the rate of decision errors over a wide range of stimulus detectability. By reconciling what previously may have seemed to be conflicting theories, we are now closer to having a complete description of reaction time and the decision processes that underlie it. [source]