The measurement of decision processes.

To know the decision strategy and the underlying information acquisition behavior of a person is important for the design of computer programs that support managerial and consumer decision making. Furthermore, knowing a person's decision strategy allows for a better prediction of his/her final choice. Both qualitative methods (e.g. verbal protocols) and quantitative methods (e.g. computer-assisted process-tracing systems) are used to investigate information acquisition behavior of managers and consumers, respectively, and to detect their decision strategies. This article presents measures that allow for the detection of decision strategies--that is, one is able to better distinguish decision strategies from each other. The presented measures are the methodological basis of widely used quantitative process-tracing methods such as computerized process-tracing tools or eye-tracking systems. Furthermore, the article reports on three experiments that demonstrate the usefulness of the measures presented. Furthermore, to show the accuracy of our measures, we developed a web-based process tracing tool, DecisionTracer, that incorporates the logic of our measures. The results of the three experiments replicate the findings of other empirical studies: People use noncompensatory decision strategies (especially elimination by aspects, lexicographic rule, satisficing, and disjunctive rule) more often than compensatory strategies (e.g. multi-attribute utility model). The article concludes that the measures and their application within computerized process-tracing tools constitute the basic research of an emerging research field called clickstream analysis, which is a method to investigate human decision processes by analyzing computer log files. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]