Project Details
Projekt
Cube and Disk Models for best-worst tasks and status-quo options
Subject Area
General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
Term
since 2022
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 512607743
Modeling the processes underlying (human) decision making is one of the most topical issues in psychology and related areas. While many approaches are static, there is growing acceptance among scholars that dynamic choice models might add to unraveling the choice process. One line of thought is based on the assumption that decisions arise as a result of accumulating information over time until a decision criterion (threshold) is met. These models, often called sequential sampling models and formalized as stochastic processes, have been applied to various psychological research areas, foremost involving binary choice options, one being "correct" and the other being "incorrect" given the specified task. The approach has been extended to preferential choice situations and, more recently, to choice situations with three choice alternatives, foremost to account for so-called context effects (attraction, similarity, compromise). Mallahi-Karai and Diederich (2019, 2021) proposed two models for general choice situations with an arbitrary number of alternatives. These models are based on a Wiener process in a higher-dimensional space. The so-called cube model was designed for making a choice between any finite number of alternatives; the disk model can be viewed as a modification of the cube model involving three alternatives, one of which considered as a status-quo option. In this project, we seek (1) to extend and apply both models to the so-called best-worst scaling situation, that is, a person faced with three or more choice alternatives is required to identify the best and the worst choice option, and to a status-quo choice setting, that is, the decision maker is not required to act but maintains the current or previous decision; (2) to test the models empirically; and (3) to compare the theoretical and empirical results with two current models, the parallel Linear Ballistic Accumulator model and the 2N-ary Choice Tree model.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
