On importance assessment and expertise in non-routine decisions: an exploratory study on the cognition of the weighting process of capital goods' attributes

Hans Heerkens, Beatrice Van der Heijden

International Journal of Management and Decision Making, 2002, vol. 3, issue 3/4, 370-398

Abstract: How do actors involved in the acquisition of capital goods assess the importance of their attributes? What is the role of expertise? Numerous instruments exist for measuring the importance attached to attributes, but little is known about the importance assessment process that precedes these importance judgments. Expectations concerning the behaviour of actors facing non-routine importance assessment problems are tested, yielding some interesting results. Firstly, the behaviour of these actors is consistent with a newly developed phase model. Even with a non-routine problem, structuring the assessment problem takes less effort than the actual weighting. Surprisingly, weighting attributes in isolation gets much more emphasis than weighting them against each other, despite the latter being the essence of importance judgments. Despite the subjects being laymen, they showed high confidence in their work. Finally, predictions concerning the behaviour of experts are made, based on Van der Heijden's dimensions of expertise.

Keywords: attribute weighting; decision theory; expertise; importance; utility. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=2484 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ids:ijmdma:v:3:y:2002:i:3/4:p:370-398

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Journal of Management and Decision Making from Inderscience Enterprises Ltd
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sarah Parker ().