Understanding human strategies for change: an empirical study

The ability to model changes in preferences is crucially important for sound decision making and effective communication. Much has been written about strategies for changing beliefs and preferences. Typically such strategies have been driven by theoretical considerations, intuitive notions of rationality, and an appeal to the principle of Minimal Change. In this paper we describe an experiment in which people were asked to rank information, then given some new information, and asked to re-rank the information. We analyse the results and provide comparisons with some well known computational strategies. Some of the results are surprising, for example, a large percentage of human strategies can be classified as either Conditionalization, Adjustment, or a combination.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: TARK
• Authors: Alankar Karol, Mary-Anne Williams
• Keywords: Effective Communication, Sound Decision Making, Strategies, TARK 2005