How much information do we need?

13 years 4 months ago

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ct 7 Modern technology is succeeding in delivering more information to people at ever faster rates. Under traditional 8 views of rational decision making where individuals should evaluate and combine all available evidence, more informa9 tion will yield better decisions. But our minds are designed to work in environments where information is often costly 10 and diﬃcult to obtain, leading us to use simple fast and frugal heuristics when making many decisions. These heuristics 11 typically ignore most of the available information and rely on only a few important cues. Yet they make choices that are 12 accurate in their appropriate application domains, achieving ecological rationality through their ﬁt to particular infor13 mation structures. This paper presents four classes of simple heuristics that use limited information—recognition-based 14 heuristics, one-reason decision mechanisms, multiple-cue elimination strategies, and quick sequential search mecha15 nisms—applied to envir...

Peter M. Todd

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