Method vs. Preference Learning In Decision Analytic Preference Assessment

“这个奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案(公法111-5)资助的。”决策分析提供了一个系统，帮助决策者了解、评估和模拟他们的偏好。然而，它假设人们的偏好是连贯的和独特的。心理学家和行为经济学家已经记录了人们的选择在各种情况下表现出偏见和不一致，特别是当他们面临新的决策情况时。当决策分析师与决策者合作评估他们的偏好和权衡时，也会出现类似的不一致，因为分析师使用的方法往往不为决策者所熟悉。在这种情况下，决策者在某种意义上“构建”了他们的偏好。由于构建过程在很大程度上取决于分析师提出的特定问题，因此可能会出现各种不同的偏差。在决策者的偏好仍在成熟的新决策领域，这些偏见可能会被放大。这项研究的目的是了解了解一个人在新领域的偏好和了解一个人的偏好评估过程之间的相互作用。实验室实验将为开发偏好评估过程的行为模型提供基础。反过来，该模型将展示如何创建方法，使分析师能够帮助决策者在新的情况下以一致的方式了解和表达他或她的偏好，同时避免因使用的问题和方法而产生的偏见。这些方法将在决定如何恢复北卡罗来纳州严重退化的牡蛎渔业的背景下进行实地测试。

"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009(Public Law 111-5)."Decision analysis offers a system for helping decision makers understand, assess, and model their preferences. It assumes, however, that people's preferences are coherent and unique. Psychologists and behavioral economists have documented a variety circumstances in which people's choices exhibit biases and inconsistencies particularly when they face novel decision situations. Similar inconsistencies arise when decision analysts work with decision makers to assess their preferences and trade-offs, because the methods the analyst uses are often unfamiliar to the decision makers. In these kinds of situations, decision makers in a sense "construct" their preferences. Because the construction process can depend to a great extent on the particular questions posed by the analyst, a variety of different biases can arise. Those biases can be amplified in novel decision domains for which the decision maker's preferences are still maturing. The objective of this research is to understand the interplay between learning about one's preferences in novel domains and learning about the process of assessing one's preferences. Laboratory experiments will provide a basis for developing a behavioral model of the preference-assessment process. In turn, the model will show how to create methods that allow an analyst to assist a decision maker in learning about and expressing his or her preferences in a consistent way in new situations while avoiding biases due to the questions and approaches used. These methods will be field tested in the context of deciding how to restore severely degraded oyster fisheries in North Carolina.