Sequential Decision Making: How Prior Choices Affect Subsequent Valuations

The Impact of Prior Choices on Subsequent Valuations

This paper develops and tests a model of how knowledge of past decisions affects future related decisions. A boundedly rational decision maker has to provide valuations for two alternatives that she has previously ranked in order of preference. The agent is uncertain about the importance of relevant attributes and can exert costly cognitive effort to resolve this uncertainty. Compared to when o...

Making Choices Impairs Subsequent Self-Control

The current research tested the hypothesis that making many choices impairs subsequent self-control. Drawing from a limited-resource model of self-regulation and executive function, the authors hypothesized that decision making depletes the same resource used for self-control and active responding. In 4 laboratory studies, some participants made choices among consumer goods or college course op...

How Prior Probability Influences Decision Making: A Unifying Probabilistic Model

How does the brain combine prior knowledge with sensory evidence when making decisions under uncertainty? Two competing descriptive models have been proposed based on experimental data. The first posits an additive offset to a decision variable, implying a static effect of the prior. However, this model is inconsistent with recent data from a motion discrimination task involving temporal integr...

Integrated Decision Making – The Choices

Convergence in a sequential two stages decision making process

We analyze a sequential decision making process, in which at each stepthe decision is made in two stages. In the rst stage a partially optimalaction is chosen, which allows the decision maker to learn how to improveit under the new environment. We show how inertia (cost of changing)may lead the process to converge to a routine where no further changesare made. We illustrate our scheme with some...