Judgment, Choice, Human Decision-Making

Last update: 25 Jun 2026 10:55
First version: 25 November 2005 (or earlier)

That is, how we actually make decisions, as opposed to mathematical theories about how rational agent ought to make decisions. Those theories are certainly not good approximations to what we actually do, which inclines me to question how they model "rationality", but that's another story for another time...

Colin Camerer, "Individual Decision Making", in Kagel and Roth (eds.), below
Gerd Gigerenzer, Adaptive Thinking: Rationality in the Real World
Gerd Gigerenzer and Peter M. Todd (eds.), Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart
Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky (eds.), Judgement under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases
Herbert Simon
- "A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice", Quarterly Journal of Economics 69 (1955): 99--118 [PDF]
- Models of Bounded Rationality, vols. I--III
Richard H. Thaler, The Winner's Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life

Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, "Are Humans Good Intuitive Statisticians After All? Rethinking Some Conclusions from the Literature on Judgement Under Uncertainity", Cognition 58 (1996): 1--73 [Answer: yes, but only for frequentist statistical problems!]
Gerd Gigerenzer and Ulrich Hoffrage, "How to Improve Bayesian Reasoning without Instruction: Frequency Formats", Psychological Review 102 (1995): 684--704 [PDF reprint]

Gerd Gigerenzer, "The Bias Bias in Behavioral Economics", Review of Behavioral Economics 5 (2018): 303--336
Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini, "A Fine Is a Price", Journal of Legal Studies 29 (2000): 1--17
John H. Kagel and Alvin E. Roth (eds.), The Handbook of Experimental Economics
Ariel Rubinstein, Modeling Bounded Rationality [Review]

Nathaniel D. Daw, John P. O'Doherty, Peter Dayan, Ben Seymour and Raymond J. Dolan, "Cortical substrates for exploratory decisions in humans", Nature 441 (2006): 876--879
Coralie de Hemptinne, Sylvie Nozaradan, Quentin Duvivier, Philippe Lefevre, and Marcus Missal, "How Do Primates Anticipate Uncertain Future Events?", Journal of Neuroscience 27 (2007): 4334--4341
Paul W. Glimcher
- Decisions, Uncertainty and the Brain: The Science of Neuroeconomics
- "The Neurobiology of Visual-Saccadic Decision Making", Annual Review of Neuroscience 26 (2003): 133--179
Paul W. Glimcher and Aldo Rustichini, "Neuroeconomics: The Consilience of Brain and Decision", Science 306 (2004): 447--452
Daria Knoch, Lorena R. R. Gianotti, Alvaro Pascual-Leone, Valerie Treyer, Marianne Regard, Martin Hohmann, and Peter Brugger, "Disruption of Right Prefrontal Cortex by Low-Frequency Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Induces Risk-Taking Behavior", The Journal of Neuroscience 26 (2006): 6469--6472
Christopher K. Kovach, Nathaniel D. Daw, David Rudrauf, Daniel Tranel, John P. O'Doherty, and Ralph Adolphs, "Anterior Prefrontal Cortex Contributes to Action Selection through Tracking of Recent Reward Trends", Journal of Neuroscience 32 (2012): 8434--8442
Yonatan Loewenstein, and H. Sebastian Seung, "Operant matching is a generic outcome of synaptic plasticity based on the covariance between reward and neural activity", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 103 (2006): 15224--15229 [The abstract promises a result about all possible neural mechanisms having some fairly generic features; this is clearly the right way to do theoretical neuroscience, but rarely done...]
Jorge Moll, Frank Krueger, Roland Zahn, Matteo Pardini, Ricardo de Oliveira-Souza, and Jordan Grafman, "Human fronto-mesolimbic networks guide decisions about charitable donation", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 103 (2006): 15623--15628
Luiz Pssoa and Srikanth Padmala, "Quantitative prediction of perceptual decisions during near-threshold fear detection", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 102 (2005): 5612--5617
K. Richard Ridderinkhof, Markus Ullsperger, Eveline A. Crone and Sander Niewenhuis, "The Role of the Medial Frontal Cortex in Cognitive Control", Science 306 (2004): 443--447
Reza Shadmehr and Sandro Mussa-Ivaldi, Biological Learning and Control: How the Brain Builds Representations, Predicts Events, and Makes Decisions
Leo P. Sugure, Greg S. Corrado and William T. Newsome, "Choosing the Greater of Two Goods: Neural Currencies for Valuation and Decision Making", Nature Reviews Neuroscience 6 (2005): 363--375

Jim Engle-Warnick, William J. McCausland and John H. Miller, "The Ghost in the Machine: Inferring Machine-Based Strategies from Observed Behavior", working paper 2004-11 of the Département de sciences énomiques, Université de Montréal [Thanks to John Miller for pointing this out to me!]
David A. Hensher et al. Applied Choice Analysis: A Primer ["Application of quantitative statistical methods to study choices made by individuals"]

George Ainslie, [The Breakdown of Will
Beach, The Psychology of Decision Making
Jonathan Bendor, Sunil Kumar and David A. Siegel, "Satisficing: A Pretty Good Heuristic" [PDF preprint. From the abstract: "[L]ittle work to date has been done in nailing down the long- and medium-run implications of satisficing. ... [W]e show that satisficing does not automatically guide decision makers to optimal strategies even in the long-run. ... [S]atisficing does produce reasonable and intuitive behavior over all time scales in many situations, including those in which the path to optimization is unclear. We think the good news here outweighs the bad; hence satisficing earns the label of a 'pretty good' heuristic."]
Seth Bullock and Peter M. Todd, "Made to Measure: Ecological Rationality in Structured Environments", Minds and Machines 9 (1999): 497--541
Colin F. Camerer, Teck-Hua Ho and Juin-Kuan Chong, "A Cognitive Hierarchy Model of Games", Quarterly Journal of Economics 119: 861--898 [Abstract: "Players in a game are 'in equilibrium' if they are rational, and accurately predict other players' strategies. In many experiments, however, players are not in equilibrium. An alternative is 'cognitive hierarchy' (CH) theory, where each player assumes that his strategy is the most sophisticated. The CH model has inductively defined strategic categories: step 0 players randomize; and step k thinkers best-respond, assuming that other players are distributed over step 0 through step k-1. This model fits empirical data, and explains why equilibrium theory predicts behavior well in some games and poorly in others. An average of 1.5 steps fits data from many games."]
Andrew Caplin, Mark Dean and Daniel Martin, "Searching and Satisficing", American Economic Review 101 (2011): 2899--2922
Terry Connolly, "Action as a Fast and Frugal Heuristic", Minds and Machines 9 (1999): 479--496
Vincent P. Crawford, Miguel A. Costa-Gomes, and Nagore Iriberri, "Structural Models of Nonequilibrium Strategic Thinking: Theory, Evidence, and Applications", Journal of Economic Literature 51 (2013): 5--62
Estes, Classification and Cognition
Gerg Gigerenzer and Christoph Engel, [Heuristics and the Law
Gerg Gigerenzer and Reinhard Selten (eds.), Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox
Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So
Thomas Gilovich, Dale Griffin and Daniel Kahneman (eds.), Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment
Michael A. Goodrich, Wynn C. Stirling and Erwin R. Boer, "Satisficing Revisited", Minds and Machines 10 (2000): 79--110
Brit Grosskopf, Yoella Bereby-Meyer and Max Bazerman, "On the Robustness of the Winner's Curse Phenomenon", Theory and Decision 63 (2007): 389--418 [PDF preprint. "We set out to find ways to help decision makers overcome the 'winner's curse,' a phenomenon commonly observed in asymmetric information bargaining situations, and instead found strong support for its robustness."]
Kenneth R. Hammond, Judgments Under Stress
Gene M. Heyman, Addiction: A Disorder of Choice
Steven J. Humphrey, "Does Learning Diminish Violations of Independence, Coalescing and Monotonicity?", Theory and Decision 61 (2006): 93--128 ["Violations of expected utility theory are sometimes attributed to imprecise preferences interacting with a lack of learning opportunity in the experimental laboratory. [Performs new experiemnts] The data show that whilst in some cases expected utility maximising behaviour increases with the learning opportunity, so too do systematic violations. ... [N]o presumption that anomalous behaviour under risk is transient..."]
Bryan D. Jones, Politics and the Architecture of Choice
Kahneman and Tversky (eds.), Choices, Values, and Frames
Norbert L. Kerr, Robert J. MacCoun and Geoffrey P. Kramer, "Bias in judgment: Comparing individuals and groups", Psychological Review 103 (1996): 687--719 [Very large PDF reprint]
Norbert L. Kerr and R. Scott Tindale, "Group Performance and Decision Making", Annual Review of Psychology 55 (2004): 623--655
G. Klein
- Intuition at Work
- Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions
Sarah Lichtenstein and Paul Slovic (eds.), The Construction of Preference
Mary Frances Luce, James R. Bettman, and John W. Payne, Emotional Decisions: Trade off Difficulty and Coping in Consumer Choice
Arthur Lupia, Matthew D. McCubbins and Samuel L. Popkin, Elements of Reason: Cognition, Choice, and the Bounds of Rationality
James G. March, A Primer on Decision-Making: How Decisions Happen
Laura Martignon and Michael Schmitt, "Simplicity and Robustness of Fast and Frugal Heuristics", Minds and Machines 9 (1999): 565--593
Alex Mintz and Carly Wayne, The Polythink Syndrome: U.S. Foreign Policy Decisions on 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and ISIS
Nisbett and Ross, Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgement
Pattelli-Pulmarini, Inevitable Illusions
John W. Payne, James R. bettman and Eric J. Johnson, The Adaptive Decision Maker
David Pears, Motivated Irrationality
Misha Perepelitsa, "A model of discrete choice based on reinforcement learning under short-term memory", arxiv:1908.06133
Fenna H. Poletiek, Hypothesis Testing Behaviour [Review by Denny Borsboom]
John L. Pollock, "Plans and Decision", Theory and Decision 57 (2004): 79--107 ["Counterexamples are constructed for classical decision theory, turning on the fact that actions must often be chosen in groups rather than individually, i.e., the objects of rational choice are plans. It is argued that there is no way to define optimality for plans that makes the finding of optimal plans the desideratum of rational decision-making. An alternative called 'locally global planning' is proposed as a replacement for classical decision theory. Decision-making becomes a non-terminating process without a precise target rather than a terminating search for an optimal solution." This is more normative than the rest of this notebook, but it'll do for now...]
Howard Rachlin, The Science of Self-Control
Amnon Rapoport and J. Neil Bearden, "Strategic behavior in monkeys", Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9 (2005): 213--215
James Reason, Human Error [Wonderful author/title correspondence...]
Catrin Rode, Leda Cosmides, Wolfgang Hell and John Tooby, "When and why do people avoid unknown probabilities in decision under uncertainty? Testing some predictions from optimal foraging theory", Cognition 72 (1999): 269--304
Frederic Schick, Ambiguity and Logic
Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
Eldar Shafir and Robyn A. LeBoeuf, "Rationality", Annual Review of Psychology 53 (2002): 491--517
Robert J. Sternberg (ed.), Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid
Stuart Sutherland, Irrationality: Why We Don't Think Straight
Arne Traulsen, Dirk Semmann, Ralf D. Sommerfeld, Hans-Juergen Krambeck, Manfred Milinski, "Human strategy updating in evolutionary games", arxiv:1001.3768
Viktor J. Vanberg, "Rational Choice vs. Program-Based Behavior: Alternative Theoretical Approaches and Their Relevance for the Study of Institutions", Rationality and Society 14 (2002): 7--54
Kathleen D. Vohs, Nicole L. Mead, and Miranda R. Goode, "The Psychological Consequences of Money", Science 314 (2006): 1154--1156