This proposal investigates the sources and dimensions of difficulty in decision making. Just as risk management practices were advanced by an understanding of the dimensions of risk, the proposal argues, so should decision management practices be advanced by an understanding of the dimensions of perceived difficulty. The proposed research effort seeks to understand the sources of perceived difficulty by testing whether experts' and non.experts' intuitions differ from analytic results in systematic ways, using physicians' analyses of medical dilemmas as the primary data source. Specific strategies for reducing the difficulty of decisions, such as improving the presentation of information about temporal consequences and about differences in option sets, will be tested in the context of real.world decisions typically faced by physicians and by non.physicians. The ultimate goal of the project, which is to learn new ways to make decisions less difficult, was considered to be important from both a theoretical and applied perspective, and the principal investigators were believed to have both the experience and the contacts necessary to design and to conduct the proposed empirical research.
