This very ambitious proposal tackles the issue of what is meant by "relative importance" in preference judgment, how it enters into decisions, and how it is communicated to others. The concept of relative importance plays an unusual role in current decision analyses. In standard utility theories, importance has no meaningful interpretation. However, people who actually make decisions find it a natural concept to use in thinking about preferences. The principal investigators plan to evaluate a wide variety of ramifications of the relative importance concept. The plan behind the proposed research is to take a two-pronged approach involving both an examination of the technical aspects of weighting coefficients and an empirical assessment of the psychological processes involved. A particular focus will be on the interpersonal aspects, i.e., the preferences of another person that one infers from information on relative importance, or the weight judgments one infers from preferences for another. Such inferences are commonly made and are basic to various collective decision theories (especially agency theory). Yet, there has been almost no previous analysis on how such inferences are formed. In all, the proposed research will provide substantial new insights into the concept of relative importance.
