Introduction

Multiple strategies and contingent processing

In the preceding chapter, we developed two themes, the first concerning strategies themselves and the second their application. Our first theme was that different decision strategies have different characteristics. For example, some strategies, such as elimination by aspects, simplify the acquisition and evaluation of information, bringing the processing demands within the constraints of human information processing; others, such as additive utility, do not provide such simplifications. In addition, some strategies, such as additive utility, deal directly with conflict, whereas others do not.

Our second theme was that many different task and context variables affect which decision strategies will be employed. Our review of the literature clearly shows that decision behavior is highly contingent. Not only do different people use different strategies for the same task, but a given individual may apply different strategies to subtly different tasks.

This chapter offers a theoretical framework for understanding how people decide which decision strategy to use in solving a particular judgment or choice problem. Underlying that framework is the belief that the use of multiple strategies by a decision maker is an adaptive response to decision problems by a limited informationprocessing system with multiple goals for the decision process.

Theoretical assumptions

The proposed framework (model) is based on five major assumptions: First, we assume that people have available a repertoire of strategies or heuristics for solving decision problems of any complexity.