Fast and frugal heuristics for new product screening – is managerial judgment ‘good enough?’

Project screening in the fuzzy front-end of product development is dominantly based on managerial judgment, yet little is known about the quality of heuristic screening decisions. This research models three commonly discussed fast and frugal (F%F) heuristics for project screening (take-the-best, tallying and elimination-by-aspect) and explores their performance. An illustrative dataset of 52 new product development projects is used to compare the performance of F%F heuristics against that of regression models, which reflect compensatory judgment behaviour. The findings uncover a 'less is more' effect that justifies the use of simple heuristics in early stage product screening; two out of the three F%F heuristics reach accuracies of over 80% for project selection and 70% for project rejection and the best F%F model, tallying, performs similarly to the best regression model. The findings warrant a fresh look at managerial screening heuristics as 'good enough' decision making approach.