Agenda Effects on Group Decisions

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9410288 Hastie ABSTRACT A program of empirical research on agenda effects in small decision making groups will be conducted. The experimental variations involve the sequencing and grouping of decision alternatives into subsets to structure the decision process into "Open" (all alternatives considered simultaneously), "Tournament" (alternatives pitted against one another in sequence with the ultimate choice determined by the final "winner"), "Optional Stopping" (accept-reject decisions for a sequence of alternatives considered one at a time), and other agenda structures. Individual preferences will be manipulated in two ways: (a) induced preference manipulations by making individual monetary payoffs contingent on the group choice and (b) attitudinal manipulations whereby choice options are made more or less attractive by varying their attributes and measuring individual preferences. Individual and group choices, information pooling during discussion, individual judgments of the group choice, reports of individual decision strategies, and other dependent measures will be assessed to describe the choice process. The decisions reached by committees, juries, and other important small groups are affected, sometimes dramatically, by the manner in which the group structures its decision process. The present research studies small groups attempting to solve practical, political, and legal problems. Specifically, we study the effects on group decisions of variations in the order of consideration and the pattern of direct comparisons of decision alternatives; we call these variations manipulations of the group "agenda." A second experimental variable, the distribution of information across group members at the start of discussion, is also studied in most of the experiments because it also has been shown to have large, subtle effects on group decision processes and outcomes. ***