Effects Of Time Pressure And Option Number On Decision Making Behavior Under The Sequential Decision Environment

The classic decision theory says that the study about how to regulate the decision maker’schoice behavior can improve the decision-making quality and human decision making.Recent years, the study of the sequential decision theory has paid attention to the domesticand overseas scholars, because it represents a special kind of decision issues in real life,such as: searching a job to University graduates, playing the disaster relief, investing stock,choosing a partner to marry, and so on. They, this kind of problem, have a commoncharacteristic that the options are presented one by one with the passage of time, decisionmakers will have to make a choice without enough time to measure all the options. Relatedresearch found that time pressure and option number is the important variables to influencedecision makers behavior. The purpose of this paper is to research the degree andmechanism of influencing human decision behavior from two factors, which will serve forhuman decision.This paper based on the empirical research method, including the questionnaireinvestigation and laboratory experiment. Firstly, this paper proposes five basic assumptionson the basis of the related theory, combined with the purpose of this essay. Then this paperdesigns the study based on the assumptions. This study is composed of three parts. Thefirst part is a questionnaire survey. Therein, the questionnaire survey obtains the mostimportant five attribute through the self-made questionnaire in the process of thejob-searching for university graduates, and then we rank the attributes according to the datafrom the survey. The second part is the laboratory experiment which the situation isfinding a job and the five job attributes are obtained from the questionnaire survey. This isthe preliminary experiment at which aims measuring the specific times when thedecision-makers separately finish three decision task (20options,40options and80options) in the no time determination pressure. Then, we can calculates the specific timelimit based on the correlational research. And the time limit contain three different time(respectively form20options,40options,80options)which can bring the testers the high level time pressure. The third part is the official experiment. The design scheme isorthogonal test design. The concrete content is that we will take simulating thejob-searching to university graduates for the experiment task. Based on this, the paper willdiscuss the influence from time pressure and option number in the process ofdecision-making. And this study is based on many attributes search task experiment,whichis different from the previous research, and each job is provided five attribute informationin the experiment. So we set a more realistic life decision situation to make the experimentdesign more scientific and authenticity. The design also solves the problem of which thelab experimental external validity is not high.Experimental study results show that: Firstly, under the sequential decision, time pressurehas the significant influence on the decision behavior. The specific content is that timepressure can shorten the time of making decision; the decision-makers will reduce thesearch depth significantly with the increasing of the time pressure; and as time pressureincreases, more policymakers will be apt to choose the strategy of option priority mainly inthe information searching. Secondly, under the sequential decision, the number of optionswill have the significant impact on the decision behavior. And the specific content is thatthe greater number of options, the more time testers will spend; the greater number ofoptions, the less search depth; and the number of options does not have the significantimpact on the search strategy. Thirdly, under the sequential decision, there is not thesignificant impact on the decision behavior in the interaction between the time pressureand the number of option. The above conclusions rich the existing research, and provide abasis to guide human’s sequential decision, especially also provide a new perspective.