Seeing the Forest for the Trees: Information Aggregation in Online Decision-Making

The first paper looks at the effect of interface design on decisions, whereby individuals focus their attention according to the organization of information, and simply manipulating the way that option attributes are partitioned into categories induces decision-makers to ascribe different relative importance to them.

Abstract

With growing reliance on the Internet as a primary source of input into nearly every type of decision, individuals must find ways to cope with the overwhelming quantity and variety of information accessible to them. Unfortunately, while technology increases the availability of information by facilitating both sharing and retrieval, it does not yet offer clear assistance for integrating this information into coherent preferences. Furthermore, the weighting of disparate information content is subject to the inherent decision-making biases that people have been shown to exhibit in many other contexts, and reliance on simplifying heuristics may even be exacerbated in online environments where distillation of meaning from abundant or conflicting information is especially difficult. The first paper looks at the effect of interface design on decisions, whereby individuals focus their attention according to the organization of information. Simply manipulating the way that option attributes are partitioned into categories, we induce decision-makers to ascribe different relative importance to them. The second paper