Psychological models of deferred decision making (Q1100145)

In a two-state deferred decision making task one of two mutually exclusive states of nature is responsible for generating a sequence of independent, identically distributed, and costly observations. After purchasing each observation, the decision maker must either (a) stop purchasing costly observations and make a terminal choice favoring one of the two states, or (b) continue purchasing at least one more observation. We describe a new method, called pattern analysis, for distinguishing alternative models of deferred decision making. Seven different psychological models are evaluated including the optimal stopping rule, fixed sampling, random walk, fixed forgetting, horse race or accumulator, runs, and hybrid stopping rules. Violations of basic properties implied by each of these seven models are reported. The most promising psychological model was a myopic stopping rule, which prescribes purchasing observations until the expected loss of making a terminal decision after purchasing n observations is less than or equal to the sum of the costs of purchasing \(n+1\) observations.