Exploring Decision Making Under Constraints

It is the purpose of the present research to explore the characteristic of individual decision making under different time constraints and capital limitations using simulated house-buying task on the computer. Considering the too-short time constraint and its confusion with work load, the constrained time was longer in the present research, and a long-time constraint, in which the time was longer than that was spent during the house-buying with no-time constraint, was used.There were 3 experiments in this research. Experiment 1 focused on the effect of different time constraints on individual decision making. The result showed that it was the selective strategy, not the acceleration strategy that was used more popularly under short-time constraint. In both time constraints, the intra-attribute strategy was not used by all participants, but either the intra-attribute strategy or the intra-alternative one was still used by half of them. Meanwhile, the effect of time constraints on paying attention of attributes, the house-buying behavior and the appraisement of the bought houses was discussed in Experiment 1. In short, the result of Experiment 1 showed that the two kinds of time constraints indeed have influence on participants' decision making, and there are both similarity and difference between their effects.Experiment 2 mainly explored the effect of capital limitation on individual decision making. The result showed that the complexity of the decision task increased significantly when there was capital limitation. The consistent strategy of information searching was not used whether there was capital limitation or not. Also, capital limitation did not have significant effect on both the degree of paying attention of attributes and the appraisement of the bought houses. Under capital limitation, participants bought the houses earlier, and took more time to examine the information on the houses.Both of time constraints and capital limitation were used in Experiment 3, and the interaction of them on individual decision making was explored. Besides of the results similar with Experiment 1 & 2, in Experiment 3, the effects of the two factors on human decision making, on popular strategy, house-buying behavior and appraisement of the bought houses especially, were found. Moreover, the effects of the order of time constraints were also found in both Experiment 1 & 3, which could be explained with Differentiation and Consolidation Theory.Generally speaking, the results of the present research support Diff and Con Theory. The similarity and difference in individual decision making under different time constraints and capital limitations were found in the present research. With former relevant researches, the effect of the complexity of tasks on decision making under constraints were also found.