What's in the Adaptive Toolbox and How Do People Choose From It? Rational Models of Strategy Selection in Risky Choice

Florian Mohnert, Thorsten Pachur, Falk Lieder

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

Although process data indicate that people often rely on simplifying processes when choosing between risky options, current models of heuristics cannot predict people's choices very accurately. To address this apparent paradox, it has been proposed that people might adaptively choose from a toolbox of simple strategies. But which strategies are contained in this toolbox? And how do people decide when to use which decision strategy? Here, we develop a model according to which the decision maker selects a decision strategy for a given choice problem rationally from a toolbox of strategies; the content of the toolbox is estimated for each individual decision maker. Using cross-validation on an empirical data set, we find that this model of strategy selection from a personal adaptive toolbox predicts people's choices better than any single strategy (even when it is allowed to vary across participants) and better than previously proposed toolbox models. Our model comparisons show that both inferring the content of the toolbox and rational strategy selection are critical for accurately predicting people's risky choices. Furthermore, our analysis reveals considerable individual differences in the set of strategies people are equipped with and how they choose among them; these individual differences could partly explain why some people make better choices than others. These findings represent an important step towards a complete formalization of the notion that people select their cognitive strategies from a personal adaptive toolbox.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
Subtitle of host publicationCreativity + Cognition + Computation, CogSci 2019
PublisherThe Cognitive Science Society
Pages2378-2384
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)0991196775, 9780991196777
StatePublished - 2019
Externally publishedYes
Event41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Creativity + Cognition + Computation, CogSci 2019 - Montreal, Canada
Duration: 24 Jul 201927 Jul 2019

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Creativity + Cognition + Computation, CogSci 2019

Conference

Conference41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Creativity + Cognition + Computation, CogSci 2019
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityMontreal
Period24/07/1927/07/19

Keywords

  • bounded rationality
  • computational modeling
  • decision making
  • heuristics
  • strategy selection

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