This post tries to do a little tying together on a familiar subject. I look at a couple of papers that provide more perspective than typical research papers provide. First is the preliminary dissertation of Anke Söllner. She provides some educated synthesis which my posts need, but rarely get. Two of her papers which are also part of her dissertation are discussed in the posts Automatic Decision Making and Tool Box or Swiss Army Knife? I also look at a planned special issue of the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making to address “Strategy Selection: A Theoretical and Methodological Challenge.”
Söllner’s work is concerned with the question: which framework–multiple strategy or single strategy– describes multi-attribute decision making best? In multi-attribute decision making we have to choose among two or more options. Cues can be consulted and each cue has some validity in reference to the decision criterion. If the criterion is an objective one (e.g., the quantity of oil), the task is referred to as probabilistic inference, whereas a subjective criterion (e.g., preference for a day trip) characterizes a preferential choice task. The multiple strategy framework is most notably the adaptive toolbox that includes fast and frugal heuristics as individual strategies. Single strategy frameworks assume that instead of selecting one from several distinct decision strategies, decision makers employ the same uniform decision making mechanism in every situation. The single strategy frameworks include the evidence accumulation model and the connectionist parallel constraint satisfaction model.
