Psychological models of deferred decision making
type: Item
instance of: scholarly article
title: Psychological models of deferred decision making
zbMATH Open document ID: 0638.92025
DOI: 10.1016/0022-2496(88)90042-9
author: Jerome R. Busemeyer
author: Amnon Rapoport
published in: Journal of Mathematical Psychology
publication date: 1988-01-01T00:00:00Z
review text: In a two-state deferred decision making task one of two mutually exclusive states of nature is responsible for generating a sequence of independent, identically distributed, and costly observations. After purchasing each observation, the decision maker must either (a) stop purchasing costly observations and make a terminal choice favoring one of the two states, or (b) continue purchasing at least one more observation. We describe a new method, called pattern analysis, for distinguishing alternative models of deferred decision making. Seven different psychological models are evaluated including the optimal stopping rule, fixed sampling, random walk, fixed forgetting, horse race or accumulator, runs, and hybrid stopping rules. Violations of basic properties implied by each of these seven models are reported. The most promising psychological model was a myopic stopping rule, which prescribes purchasing observations until the expected loss of making a terminal decision after purchasing n observations is less than or equal to the sum of the costs of purchasing \(n+1\) observations.
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 91E99
zbMATH DE Number: 4041691
zbMATH Keywords: two-state deferred decision making
zbMATH Keywords: pattern analysis
zbMATH Keywords: optimal stopping rule
zbMATH Keywords: fixed sampling
zbMATH Keywords: random walk
zbMATH Keywords: fixed forgetting
zbMATH Keywords: horse race
zbMATH Keywords: accumulator
zbMATH Keywords: runs
zbMATH Keywords: hybrid stopping rules
zbMATH Keywords: myopic stopping rule
Wikidata QID: Q62113287
MaRDI profile type: Publication
full work available at URL: 0022-2496(88)90042-9
OpenAlex ID: W1967027293
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description: scientific article; zbMATH DE number 4041691