A COMPENSATION INDEX FOR MULTIATTRIBUTE DECISION STRATEGIES

In multiattribute decision problems, the subject has to evaluate a num ber of alternatives with given values on a number of attributes, in or der to arrive at some conclusion about the attractiveness or utility o f these alternatives. The information processing procedure leading to a conclusion is called a decision strategy, and one of the main resear ch topics in multiattribute decision research has been the extent to w hich these strategies follow compensatory principles. Judges are said to follow compensatory strategies when low values on some attributes a re compensated for by high values on other attributes. In process trac ing studies using the information board technique, descriptions of dec ision strategies are usually based on three indices of the information search process: variability of search, search pattern (Payne, 1976), and depth of search. Variability of search, defined as the standard de viation of the proportion of information searched per alternative, is considered to give an indication of the degree of compensation of a de cision strategy, compensation being smaller as variability increases. In this article, we propose an alternative way for establishing the de gree of compensation of decision strategies in information board studi es. We argue that the degree of compensation depends on both variabili ty of search and depth of search (the proportion of information search ed), and that a valid compensation index has to be a multiplicative fu nction of these two indices.