While normative models of judgment suggest that preferences should be invariant across elicitation procedures, prior research has shown that preferences are susceptible to many different influences. These include changes across response modes, the compatibility of attributes describing the alternative and response scale, and order effects. Because these effects contradict basic tenants of theories of rational choice, they are of interests not only to psychologists, but economists and management scientists as well. This proposal suggests that these effects originate from the use of multiple underlying strategies in judgment. Decision-makers, we hypothesize, select among a set of simplified strategies, or heuristics in an attempt to minimize effort while providing satisfactory level of accuracy. Many observed task effects may have their origins in these changes in strategy. The proposed research extends our work in modeling the effort and accuracy associated with decision strategies. We propose a series of process-tacing studies which attempt to validate the framework for modeling effort and error. We also hope to contribute to the empirical base by providing process analysis of some common judgmental phenomena.
