Abstract
Estrategy choice effect on cognitive effort. People have a wide variety of decision strategies. These strategies differ in the cognitive effort that is required and in the quality of the decisions that they yield. Some theories propose that the selection of the decision rule that will be used in specific situation, depend on the balance between the required effort and the quality of the resulting decision (Payne, Bettman and Johnson, 1993a, 1993b). In this study we compared the cognitive effort that is necessary to use the Equal weigh rule (EW) and additive difference rule (AD) in choice tasks with two alternatives and five dimensions. The results obtained support the hypothesis that different decision strategies require different amount of effort. Specifically, to use EW is less costly than AD in decision task with a reduced number of alternatives.
