Choice among alternative courses of action lies at the heart of the decision-making process. The study of how people make preferential choices and judgments has been of great interest to psychologists, economists, and researchers in many other fields, and over the past 20 years a number of different strategies used by people to solve decision problems have been identified. Some of those strategies involve the processing of all relevant information about the available alternatives and explicit consideration of tradeoffs among values, whereas other strategies (heuristics) use information more selectively and tend to avoid tradeoffs. As a consequence of using such selective heuristics, people sometimes make substantial decision errors.

Prior decision research has also shown that human decision behavior is highly sensitive to a wide variety of task and context factors. For example, the same individual often uses different processes for making choices rather than judgments, for choosing among a few versus many alternatives, or for deciding among a set of good versus a set of bad options. Strategy selection, in other words, is highly contingent on the properties of the decision problem.

The purpose of this book is to present a framework for understanding how people adapt their strategies for solving decision problems to the demands of the tasks they face. In attempting to understand contingent decision behavior, we view the decision maker as a limited-capacity information processor with multiple goals for the decision process.