Understanding contingent choice: A computer simulation approach

When making choices, people use a variety of information processing strategies contingent upon a number of task and context variables. An approach to investigating contingent decision behavior using an effort/accuracy framework, production system modeling of decision strategies, and Monte-Carlo simulation to explore the interactions of task properties with decision heuristics (strategies) is illustrated. The simulation results suggest that the contingent use of choice heuristics may often yield relatively high levels of decision accuracy with substantial savings in effort. The paper ends with a discussion of how the use of heuristics may vary during the course of the decision episode as the structure of the task is learned. In addition, ways to opportunistically exploit the task structure to simplify processing while still producing good decisions are identified.