Da. Seale et al., DECISION-MAKING UNDER STRICT UNCERTAINTY - AN EXPERIMENTAL TEST OF COMPETITIVE CRITERIA, Organizational behavior and human decision processes, 64(1), 1995, pp. 65-75
In decisions under strict uncertainty individual decision makers have
to choose one of a finite number of alternatives with complete informa
tion about their outcomes but in the absence of any information about
the probabilities of the various states of nature. We report two exper
iments with multiple decision tasks in which subjects were instructed
to rank the alternatives (Experiment 1), or choose the best one (Exper
iment 2). We test the major decision rules (criteria) which have been
proposed for this case in the normative literature with special attent
ion on Hurwicz's ''optimism-pessimism'' criterion which is the only on
e that can accommodate individual differences. Although none of the cr
iteria can account for the results of the majority of the subjects, ch
oices made by a sizable minority of the subjects' are consistent with
Hurwicz's model. There is no evidence for a systematic relationship be
tween the model's single ''optimism-pessimism'' parameter (inferred fo
rm choices) and, independently derived, individual measures of optimis
m (obtained from responses to personality scales). We conclude with a
discussion of the difficulty of experimentally implementing strict unc
ertainty. (C) 1995 Academic Press, Inc.