Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-2020

Abstract

Modeling human decision-making is difficult. Decision-makers are typically primed with unique biases that widen the confidence interval of judgment. Therefore, it is important that the human process in the system being modeled is designed to alleviate damaging biases and assumptions in an effort to increase process consistency between decision-makers. In this experiment, it is hypothesized that coupling specific decision-facilitation methods with a specific scale range will affect the consistency between decision-makers. This article presents a multiphase experiment that examines a varying presentation mode as well as scale range to determine how value is determined in subsequent pairwise comparisons of alternatives against specific requirements. When considering subject value ratings of the expected rank order of alternative subgroups (indicating strong criteria independence), results show that subjects used consistent comparison ratios regardless of the scale range. Furthermore, when comparing the subgroups of expected rank order responses to the subgroups of biased responses, although ratios were different, the same general trend of comparison existed within subgroups. Providing evidence that careful selection of the presentation mode can facilitate more consistent value comparisons between compatible decision-makers allows for the identification of and adjustment of disparities due to bias and potential lack of incremental scaling detail. Furthermore, by creating decision processes that render more consistent cognitive behavior between decision-makers, tighter confidence intervals can be obtained, and critical assumptions can be validated.

Comments

© 2020 The Authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This article was published as part of the Special Issue of Systems, "Human Factors in Systems Engineering."

DOI

10.3390/systems8030030

Source Publication

Systems

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