The Adaptive Decision Maker

Rating:
Summary: An excellent insight on adaptive behavior
Review: A book worth reading to develop an insight on the principles that guide consumer information processing and selection of relevant decision strategies in various choice environments. The framework that is presented here is both intuitively appealing and useful in guiding marketing thought and practice. The book itself is written to appeal to multiple classes of readers, i.e., general interest readers, academics, and practicing professionals. The underlying notions of consumer decision making based on adaptive behavior; and information processing based on "bounded rationality" are presented within a well-researched framework. The book is developed to provide useful insights on decision behavior emerging from various disciplinary orientations like, the behavioral sciences, cognitive psychology, consumer studies, and marketing among others. The framework proposed is well applied in everyday decision situations that pertain to businesses and consumers. The authors themselves are renowned researchers in their fields and therefore provide invaluable insight on adaptive consumer behavior and the limitations of human information processing.

Rating:
Summary: Models Must Fit the Reality Not The Other Way
Review: The book, The Adaptive Decision Maker is a compilation of the views of the authors, along with the views of other authors as expressed through their works. This book provides information as to what strategies individuals use to make decisions in many different situations they are faced with. Ultimately, they believe that decision-making strategies are contingent upon a variety of task, context, and individual difference factors. Their research shows that individuals are generally adaptive in their responses to different decision situations. The authors also show situations in which decision makers may not be adaptive. They conclude the book by providing insights about how to improve decisions and about opportunities for future research.

The first topic the book covers is flexibility in decision-making. Here, they explain that many social factors can influence decision-making. They believe that when an individual makes a decision, he or she may feel accountable to others such as family members or superiors in a business organization. I agree with this standpoint, however, it is important to remember that these same social factors affect their family members and others in their business organization when they make decisions. A more important fact to me is to what extent different people are affected by social factors.

The book then goes into depth on the different strategies that individuals use when making decisions. These stem from compensatory versus no compensatory, consistent versus selective processing, amount of processing, alternative-based versus attribute-base processing, formation of evaluations, and quantitative versus qualitative reasoning. They discuss the fact that a "person's repertoire of strategies may depend upon many factors, such as cognitive development, experience, and more formal training and education." They believe that decision behavior is a highly contingent form of information processing. While I believe that it is true, I do not feel that the book properly explains why this is so. The authors give many examples of decision-making, however they fail to explain why the specific decisions are made.

In general, they believe that decision behavior is highly sensitive to task factors and context factors. They believe the cognitive effort required to make a decision can be usefully measured in terms of the total number of basic information processes needed to solve a particular problem using a specific decision strategy. In addition, they state that individual differences in decision behavior may be related to differences in how effortful various elementary information processes are to the individuals.