"Time is Money": How Decision Makers Find the Balance Between Deciding Quickly and Deciding Correctly

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In the first funding phase, we investigated effects of time pressure and monetary incentives on decision processes. Our project revealed three key results, which we will further examine in three research strands of the second phase. First, we found that time pressure, monetary incentives as well as response strategies not only lead to shifts of decision criteria, but also affect the efficiency of evidence accumulation. These results challenge the traditional view that speed-accuracy tradeoffs are due only to modulations of decision criteria, whereas evidence accumulation rates are insusceptible to time pressure and strategic factors. In the second phase, we will further pursue the role of decision criteria and the efficiency of evidence accumulation for speed-accuracy tradeoffs in basic perceptual as well as in more naturalistic value-based decisions. Second, the first phase revealed that, in addition to monetary payoffs, social incentives can serve as strong trigger to optimize performance. In the second phase, we will directly address influences of social feedback, social competition, and social comparison in relation to monetary rewards, and we will examine effects of monetary and social framing on decision processes. Third, we started to study decisions under risk in economic lottery gambles in the first phase. Innovative analyses of choice-time distributions revealed that risk preference changes with decision time as well as with the format in which information is presented. The second phase will pursue the time dependence of risky decisions in a series of repeated lottery gambling tasks under time pressure and under different presentation formats. Overall, the second funding period of this project shall further examine the temporal dynamics of economic choices, which are usually underspecified in current decisiontheoretic accounts. We will delineate these processes via distributional analyses of behavioral data (i.e., response times, errors) as well as via EEG and eye tracking. In addition, computational sequential sampling models, and in particular dual process accounts, will serve as key tools for the goal to advance the link between microeconomic theories and psychological processes.