Empirical Evaluation of a Decision-Analytic Aid 1

Abstract

Many studies have demonstrated that the use of decision analysis encourages people to choose alternatives which maximize subjective expected utility and are, therefore, more internally consistent than decisions arrived at intuitively. However, few experiments have investigated whether subjects using a decision-analytic aid produce “better” or more correct decisions in light of the ultimate outcome of these decisions. To help fill this research gap, an experiment was performed to compare the degree of success experienced by aided and unaided subjects in attaining correct decisions.