Strategies of information seeking in deferred decision making

Abstract In a simple binary decision task, subjects could purchase information that was relevant to the decision to be made. Three models of behavior were described, based upon three strategies that might determine how much information was bought. The optimal strategy, one based upon a critical odds, was clearly not used by subjects. A fixed-sample-size strategy was inadequate to describe behavior, but a modification of this strategy was a better description. The form of departures of the data from the predictions of the three models implied that subjects used a stopping strategy defined by a critical odds that decreased as a positively accelerated function of sample size.