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Modeling Behavioral Decision Making: Creation and Representation of Judgment

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Behavioral Operational Research

Abstract

The processes of judgment and choice, which are the core of behavioral decision making, suggest people infer or construct a percept from a collection of sensory cues that deliver incomplete and imperfect information. This chapter presents a model which uses Brunswikian principles to represent human behavior. The model reflects behavior classified as fast and frugal heuristics or simple rules. Some of the findings of the model for behavioral operational research (OR) are: research should consider the level of knowledge of the decision maker, since behavioral rules can vary according to the knowledge of the decision maker; decision making accuracy improves over time but depends on access to evidence and its interpretation; interpretation of similar events varies across subjects; and anchoring-and-adjustment is a useful heuristic to portray the functionalist processes but is conditioned by the previous three findings.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The term comes from the psychologist Ergon Brunswik. His main work is related to the area of perception and functionalization in the psychology field. A key article is “Representative Design and probabilistic Thoery in a functional psychology” published in 1955 by Psychological Review 62 (193–217).

  2. 2.

    Systematic design refers to the design of experiments where investigators define different stimuli to generate uncorrelated independent variables to test hypotheses about behavior.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Scarman Road, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK

    Martin Kunc

Authors
  1. Martin Kunc
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

    Martin Kunc

  2. BT Technology Service & Operations, Martlesham Heath, UK

    Jonathan Malpass

  3. Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

    Leroy White

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© 2016 The Author(s)

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Kunc, M. (2016). Modeling Behavioral Decision Making: Creation and Representation of Judgment. In: Kunc, M., Malpass, J., White, L. (eds) Behavioral Operational Research. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53551-1_8

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