Sequential Decision Making with Relative Ranks: An Experimental Investigation of the "Secretary Problem"&gt;

Seale, Darryl A.; Rapoport, Anatol

doi:10.1006/obhd.1997.2683

Cited by 170 publications

(214 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Decision-making includes several cognitive and noncognitive processes, such as attention, working memory (Bechara et al 1994), contingency approximation (Tversky et al 1988;Elliott and Dolan 1998), hypothesis testing (Elliott and Dolan 1998), rule generation (Seale and Rapoport 1997), impulsivity (Green et al 1999;Monterosso and Ainslie 1999) and risk-taking (Rahman et al 1999;Rogers et al 1999a). The integrity of the orbitofrontal cortex is important for decision-making when the outcome is uncertain but some responses are associated with a better long-term outcome than others.…”

Section: Stimulant-dependent Subjects Show Dysfunctions In Decision-mmentioning

confidence: 99%

Behavioral and Functional Neuroimaging Evidence for Prefrontal Dysfunction in Methamphetamine-Dependent Subjects

Paulus

2002

Neuropsychopharmacology

261

216

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Stimulant-dependent subjects show dysfunctions in decision-making similar to those seen in subjects with ventromedial prefrontal cortex lesions. Studies of drug craving, reward association, and decision-making have implicated dysfunctions of the dorsolateral and orbitofrontal cortex as a key neural substrate in subjects with stimulant dependence. Here, a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study was carried out to determine the relationship between decision-making dysfunction and neural activation in different prefrontal areas. This investigation tested the behavioral hypothesis that methamphetamine-dependent subjects in early sustained remission show decision-making dysfunctions that are consistent with an increased reliance on stimulus-contingent response selection. It was hypothesized that these decision-making dysfunctions are due to differences in task-related activation in the dorsolateral and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Ten methamphetamine-dependent subjects were compared with ten age-and education-matched controls performing a twochoice prediction task and a two-choice response task during a fMRI session. Response bias, latency, and mutual information measures assessing the underlying strategies of the decision-making sequences were obtained. First, methamphetamine-dependent subjects were more influenced by the immediately preceding outcome during the two-choice prediction task relative to normal comparison subjects. Second, methamphetamine-dependent subjects activated less dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (BA 9) and failed to activate ventromedial cortex (BA 10,11) The compulsive and nonadaptive nature of drug-taking behavior in substance-dependent subjects has led several investigators to hypothesize that subjects with substance dependence show a dysregulation of ventromedial or orbitofrontal cortex Rolls 2000; Volkow and Fowler 2000). Disruption of the orbitofrontal cortex via the striato-thalamo-orbitofrontal neural systems loop, which is critical for the assessment of stimulus-reward relationships, has been proposed as a key neural substrate underlying the neural systems dysregulation in substance dependence (Volkow and Fowler 2000). Specifically, the orbitofrontal cortex maintains a detailed representation of rewarding stimuli and updates the current reward value of a stimulus continually (O'Doherty et al. 2000). Therefore, the orbitofrontal cortex is critical for rapid stimulus-reinforcement association learning and the correction of these associations when reinforcement contingencies change (Rolls 2000). The combination of dorsolateral and orbitofrontal cortex dysregulation in substance-dependent subjects may affect three distinct behavioral functions : first, expectancy, which is based on the predictions of reward and observed probabilities of reinforcement with a stimulus; second, compulsion, which involves the repetitive application of a behavioral strategy despite the lack of association of reward with the stimulus; third, decision-making, which involves the balancing of expec...

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Section: Stimulant-dependent Subjects Show Dysfunctions In Decision-mmentioning

confidence: 99%

Behavioral and Functional Neuroimaging Evidence for Prefrontal Dysfunction in Methamphetamine-Dependent Subjects

Paulus

2002

Neuropsychopharmacology

261

216

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“…While this approach is optimal given the problem setting, it only yields a success rate of 37%, and on average requires searching through 74% of the population before stopping. Seale and Rapoport (1997) studied the behavior of people engaged in a sequential search problem equivalent to the secretary problem. They regarded the optimal 37% rule as only a benchmark and put more emphasis on finding simple heuristics that would be a better explanation of the actual behavior of the participants in their studies.…”

Section: Satisficing Heuristics For Sequential Choicementioning

confidence: 99%

Bounding rationality to the world

Todd

Gigerenzer

2003

Journal of Economic Psychology

246

118

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Simon proposed that human rationality is bounded by both internal (mental) and external (environmental) constraints. Traditionally, these constraints have been seen as independent, leading to a notion of bounded rationality that is either the attempt to do as well as possible given the demands of the world -the notion of optimization under constraints -or as the suboptimal outcome of the limited cognitive system -the realm of cognitive illusions. But there is a third possibility, following SimonÕs original conception: rather than being unrelated, the two sets of bounds may fit together like the blades in a pair of scissors. The mind can take advantage of this fit to make good decisions, by using mental mechanisms whose internal structure exploits the external information structures available in the environment. In this paper we lay out a research program for studying simple decision heuristics of this sort that expands on SimonÕs own search for mechanisms of bounded rationality. We then illustrate how these heuristics can make accurate decisions in appropriate environments, and present detailed examples of two heuristics inspired by SimonÕs ideas on recognition-based processing and satisficing in sequential search.

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“…In the Secretary Problem (Seale & Rapoport, 1997;Seale & Rapoport, 2000;Zwick et al, 2003;Bearden & Murphy, 2007), candidates for a secretarial post are interviewed one at a time and the task is to pick the best candidate for the job. The candidates are presented in a random order, and it is assumed that each candidate can be accurately ranked relative to previously interviewed candidates.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Searching for the highest number

Howe

Little

2014

Atten Percept Psychophys

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When viewing a collection of products how does a consumer decide which one to buy? To do this task, the consumer not only needs to evaluate the desirability of the products, taking into account factors such as quality and price, but also needs to search through the products to find the most desirable one. We studied the search process using an abstraction of a common consumer choice task. In our task, observers searched an array of numbers for the highest. Crucially, the observers did not know in advance what this number would be, which made it difficult to know when the search should be terminated. In this way, our search task mimicked a problem often faced by consumers in a supermarket setting where they also may not know in advance what the most desirable product will be. We compared several computational models. We found that our data was best described by a process that assumes that observers terminate their search when they find a number that exceeds an internal threshold. Depending on the observer and the circumstances, this threshold appeared either to be fixed or to decrease over the course of the trial. This threshold can explain why in some situations the observers terminate the search without inspecting all the numbers in the display, whereas in other situations observers act in a seemingly irrational manner, continuing the search even after inspecting all the numbers.

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Sequential Decision Making with Relative Ranks: An Experimental Investigation of the "Secretary Problem">

Cited by 170 publications

References 20 publications

Behavioral and Functional Neuroimaging Evidence for Prefrontal Dysfunction in Methamphetamine-Dependent Subjects

Behavioral and Functional Neuroimaging Evidence for Prefrontal Dysfunction in Methamphetamine-Dependent Subjects

Bounding rationality to the world

Searching for the highest number

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