Reid Hastie - US grants

This project involves a series of experiments to study the effects of monetary incentives on the performance of a mental arithmetic "production" task. The nature of the contingencies will be varied to create an experimental design comparing the effects of large, medium, and small monetary payoffs in piece rate, variable ratio, quota, and tournament incentive schemes, including flat hourly wage conditions. To a much greater extent than in previous research, we will measure the effects of incentive scheme contingency and size of monetary award on the fine-grained structure of behavior. It is expected that the results of this systematic study will lead to well-calibrated tasks which can be used in other experimental studies of incentive effects which should yield to greater generalizability of research findings.

9308369 Hastie The project will examine the effects of monetary incentives on the performance of cognitive tasks. The nature of the incentive contingencies will be varied to create an experimental design to compare the effect of large and small monetary payoffs in piece rate, variable ratio, quota, and tournament incentive schemes, including flat rate payment. While some prior research has studied these schemes, work tasks have not been standardized, so that it is difficult to obtain a true assessment of each incentive scheme. By standardizing the task, it should be possible to obtain more precise measurement of the effect of incentive on the detailed worker behavior. A comparative evaluation and integration cognitive theory and models inspired by utility theory will be conducted. ***

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. ***

How do people learn, revise, and reason about everyday biological,
physics, artifact, and social categories? The presence and structure of
causal knowledge about the interrelations among the properties associated
with novel, but plausible everyday categories will be studied in five behavioral
experiments. At the same time, in a factorial design, the statistical
structure of the properties associated with members of the categories will
be manipulated. The experimental manipulations vary the presence and
structure of this background information: participants will be tutored on
information organized into "common-cause," "common effect," "linear
chain," or "no inter-relationship" schemas. Then the effects of this
recently learned background information on learning, classification,
inductive inferences and similarity judgments will be measured. The
impact of information that disconfirms prior knowledge of these concepts
will also be studied, as a function of the participant's beliefs about
causal structure of the categories. The results will advance our
theoretical and practical knowledge about category representation and
category-based reasoning. The research addresses many philosophical and
psychological questions about everyday knowledge and reasoning. The
results are directly relevant to science education: How do we learn
general, background scientific information and then relate that knowledge
to specific scientific concepts.

The success or failure of an organization hinges on its ability to effectively process information. Effective information processing requires people to acquire information themselves and to communicate with one another. The communication patterns that emerge from people?s choices about when, and with whom, to communicate have direct consequences for the speed at which information moves around an organization, and the validity of that information. These processes and factors are especially important for organizations responding to causal shocks or crises in their resource environments (e.g., financial actors facing the 2008 Housing Market Crash, all citizens facing the COVID-19 Pandemic).

This Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (DDRIG) explores the communication networks that emerge among people reacting to changes in their resource environment. We apply an experimental method plus agent-based modeling to zero-in on the causal relationship between resource availability and communication network structure. Our overarching hypothesis is that when resources become increasingly scarce, people connect with fewer communication partners, and increase their rate of communication with each partner. Thus, social networks will shrink in size and become more densely connected in response to resource scarcity. The reverse pattern of communication occurs in times of abundance. We also assess the adaptive efficacy of these collective communication strategies in response to resource shocks to draw conclusions that will be helpful in designing and managing organizational responses to crises. The results of this investigation will help us understand, and anticipate, the way environmental shocks ? like an economic recession or pandemic ? affect an organization?s ability to effectively manage information.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

This project explores how people decide where to look when searching for valued outcomes (like products, services, or jobs) when many options are available. One example is how consumers visit travel websites when booking flights. This project helps explain the order in which a person would visit travel websites based on what they expect to find. In a series of online experiments, people are given choices like those they might face when shopping online, and their data about location search and choices are recorded. Participants’ behavior is summarized by describing the typical decision strategies that they use to make these decisions. These decision strategies are compared against optimal mathematical and economic models to identify inefficiencies and errors. Together the descriptive behavioral findings and the optimal analysis combine to make recommendations and innovations to improve online search. This research has the potential to enhance public understanding of online shopping and search behaviors. It can help government agencies, non-profit organizations, and corporations improve the design of their websites to help users find what they are looking for. It can also help consumers search for items online by highlighting common bad search habits that hinder effective searching. Finally, while this research focuses on consumer search, people search for many other things, jobs, opportunities, and services and the findings can be applied to these other situations as well.<br/><br/>This project explores how people navigate as they search sequentially for the best outcomes in an environment defined by search costs and differing expectations for outcomes at different locations. The goal of this research is to understand the strategies that people use to decide where to look for good outcomes based on search costs and their expectations (i.e., navigation). Studies compare observed strategies to normative economic models of navigation. This proposal is distinctive because it: (A) examines navigation behavior in the context of sequential search using controlled experiments; (B) compares navigation behaviors against the predictions of an influential optimal search model (Weitzman, 1979); (C) examines cognitive strategies used by people as they navigate in search; (D) develops a novel experimental method that allows comparing navigation behaviors to predictions from normative models and to identify simplifying heuristics; and (E) utilizes agent-based models to understand the adaptive nature of search heuristics.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.