The roles of planning, learning, and mental models in repeated dynamic decision making

Yanliu Huang and J. Wesley Hutchinson

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2013, vol. 122, issue 2, 163-176

Abstract: Repeated search and decision making is a common consumer activity that should benefit from advanced planning. In three simulated shopping experiments, we find that people often fail to plan spontaneously or, when they do plan, do not use an appropriate mental model of the search problem. We also manipulate the mental models used by subjects and find that while our manipulation successfully encourages the development of appropriate mental models and improves performance when search costs are low, it does not result in the type of sophisticated mental model required to change strategies based on increased search costs. Finally, we show that the benefits of planning generalize to real world shopping behavior in a field experiment.

Keywords: Planning; Mental model; Repeated decision making; Learning; Price search (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jobhdp:v:122:y:2013:i:2:p:163-176

DOI: 10.1016/j.obhdp.2013.07.001

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