Report format and the decision maker's task: An experimental investigation

Abstract This paper describes an experiment investigating whether the most appropriate report format is a function of the information needed by the decision maker. The latter is a task characteristic which can be described in terms of the question to be answered with an information presentation. Thirty MBA students were asked to answer a set of questions with financial information presented in four forms: line graph, bar chart, pie chart, and table. The results indicate that the question to be answered and the forms of presentation interactively effect performance, and that no one form of presentation is best in all situations.

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