Most difficult decisions require tradeoffs among competing objectives that cannot be maximized simultaneously. This research investigates how changes in perceived task goals lead to changes in the relative weighting of decisions. This research will test the recently proposed task-goal hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, tasks whose goal is to differentiate among alternatives lead to greater weighing of the most important objectives than tasks whose goal is to equate alternatives. The proposed research has important implications both for theories of decision making and for methods of measuring preferences in decision analysis, marketing and public policy.
