A COMPARISON OF SINGLE-STEP AND MULTIPLE-STEP TRANSITION ANALYSES OF MULTIATTRIBUTE DECISION STRATEGIES

Evaluating information is a fundamental component of multiattribute de cision making that can be guided by one of many cognitive strategies, Considerable research has examined the factors that influence strategy selection; however, the identification of strategies remains problema tic, The search sequence or transitions that a decision maker uses whe n searching a matrix of decision information can provide important clu es to the strategy guiding the processing of decision information, The most common form of strategy analysis is to examine each transition f rom one piece of information to the next to establish whether these tr ansitions are primarily alternative or attribute based. However, the r esulting single-step transition indices often restrict strategy identi fication to a quantitative measure of compensatoriness and were found to provide conflicting results for the same search data. The current p aper proposes a multiple-step transition analysis that records more co mplex, longer transitions to provide a multivariate profile of the str ategy. Empirical support for the advantages of a multiple-step transit ion analysis over single-step transition indices is also provided. (C) 1997 Academic Press.