Conflict and Tradeoffs in Decision Making

What makes some decisions easy and others difficult? Current research in judgment and decision making indicates that conflict plays a decisive role in decision making processes. The essays in this book address questions about the causes of conflict and its effects on decision making and emotions, particularly (but not only) the emotion of regret. Several chapters address the role of attribute tradeoffs, such as that between money and risk, in the measurement of values for policy purposes. The chapters provide overviews of several current research programs and present new data. Methods involve hypothetical scenarios, other questionnaires, interviews, and observations of behavior outside the laboratory. Although most authors are influenced by psychology, others take economic and sociological approaches.

• Hot topic • Edited by prominent researchers in the field • Uses real life examples to illustrate decision making processes

1. Predicting perceived differences in tradeoff difficulty Jane Beattie and Sema Barlas; 2. The enhancement of feature salience in dichotomous choice dilemmas David A. Houston, Deborah Sherrill-Mittleman and Mathew Weeks; 3. The impact of emotional trade-off difficulty on decision behavior Mary Francis Luce, John W. Payne and James R. Bettman; 4. Impulse buying in ordinary and ‘compulsive’ consumers Helga Dittmar; 5. What to do when decisions go awry: behavioral consequences of experienced regret Marcel Zeelenberg, J. Jeffrey Inman and Rik G. M. Pieters; 6. Decisions about prenatal screening R. Murray and J. Beattie; 7. Talk about tradeoffs: judgements of relative importance and contingent decision behavior William M. Goldstein, Sema Barlas and Jane Beattie; 8. Private values and public policy Michael Jones-Lee and Graham Loomes; 9. Measuring value tradeoffs: problems and some solutions Jonathan Baron; 10. Decisions with mutliple stakeholders and conflicting objectives Deltof Von Winterfeldt; 11. Designing websites to empower health care consumers Mark Spranca PhD; 12. Interpreting conflicts between intuition and formal models Deborah Frisch.

\'To the best of my knowledge, there is no other resource which covers the topic of tradeoffs and decision difficulty as comprehensively. Researchers as well as practitioners will benefit from this book.\' Journal of Behavioural Decision Making