The Role of Experience in Information use and Decision Making by Marketing Managers

The authors report the results of a study on the use of information and decision making by practicing marketing managers. They examine the effect of managerial experience and decision programmability on managers’ information use and decisions. The results indicate that experience is an important determinant of managers’ behavior for relatively unprogrammed decisions. Moreover, the effects of experience are manifested in the evaluation and use of “soft” information, amount of information used, and the decisions themselves. The authors conclude that in studying the effects of experience on managerial decisions, one must examine the steps leading to a decision; they find that experience affects the prior step in which information is acquired. To the extent experience is a proxy for expertise, the article affords insights into the key ingredients in training and modeling expert managers.

[1]  Paul J. Feltovich,et al.  Categorization and Representation of Physics Problems by Experts and Novices , 1981, Cogn. Sci..

[2]  H. Theil.  Principles of econometrics , 1971 .

[3]  P. Green,et al.  Conjoint Analysis in Consumer Research: Issues and Outlook , 1978 .

[4]  H A Simon,et al.  The theory of learning by doing. , 1979, Psychological review.

[5]  John D. C. Little,et al.  Research Opportunities in the Decision and Management Sciences: Report of the Dallas National Science Foundation Workshop , 1986 .

[6]  Richard Staelin,et al.  Judgment Based Marketing Decision Models: An Experimental Investigation of the Decision Calculus Approach , 1979 .

[7]  J. W. Hutchinson,et al.  Dimensions of Consumer Expertise , 1987 .

[8]  Allen Newell,et al.  Human Problem Solving. , 1973 .

[9]  John W. Payne,et al.  Contingent decision behavior. , 1982 .

[10]  G. Zaltman,et al.  Factors Affecting the Use of Market Research Information: A Path Analysis , 1982 .

[11]  Leonard M. Lodish,et al.  Commentary on “Judgment Based Marketing Decision Models” , 1981 .

[12]  Peter G. W. Keen,et al.  Decision support systems : an organizational perspective , 1978 .

[13]  Herbert A. Simon,et al.  The new science of management decision , 1960 .

[14]  Paul Harmon,et al.  Expert systems: artificial intelligence in business , 1985 .

[15]  G. Zaltman,et al.  Patterns of Research Use in Private and Public Sectors , 1983 .

[16]  W. Hays.  Statistics, 4th ed. , 1988 .

[17]  P. Farris,et al.  The Product Management Audit , 1992 .

[18]  F. Acito,et al.  Evaluation and Use of Marketing Research by Decision Makers: A Behavioral Simulation , 1987 .

[19]  M. Holbrook.  Integrating Compositional and Decompositional Analyses to Represent the Intervening Role of Perceptions in Evaluative Judgments , 1981 .

[20]  Frederick Hayes-Roth,et al.  Building expert systems , 1983, Advanced book program.

[21]  Arvind Rangaswamy,et al.  Expert systems for marketing , 1987 .

[22]  B. H. Beach.  Expert judgment about uncertainty: Bayesian decision making in realistic settings. , 1975, Organizational behavior and human performance.

[23]  Barton A. Weitz,et al.  Knowledge, Motivation, and Adaptive Behavior: A Framework for Improving Selling Effectiveness , 1986 .

[24]  Shelby H. McIntyre,et al.  An Experimental Study of the Impact of Judgment-Based Marketing Models , 1982 .

[25]  D. Krantz,et al.  The use of statistical heuristics in everyday inductive reasoning , 1983 .

[26]  Leonard M. Lodish,et al.  Evaluation of the Effectiveness of a Model Based Salesman's Planning System by Field Experimentation , 1977 .

[27]  M. Brucks.  The Effects of Product Class Knowledge on Information Search Behavior , 1985 .

[28]  Lawrence Birnbaum,et al.  The Organization of Expert Systems, A Tutorial , 1982, Artif. Intell..

[29]  W. DeSarbo,et al.  Componential Segmentation in the Analysis of Consumer Trade-Offs , 1979 .

[30]  Barton A. Weitz,et al.  Knowledge, motivation, and adaptive behavior : a framework for improving selling effectiveness , 1986 .

[31]  George J. Spilich,et al.  Acquisition of domain-related information in relation to high and low domain knowledge. , 1979 .

[32]  Gerald Zaltman,et al.  A Comparison of Factors Affecting Researcher and Manager Perceptions of Market Research Use , 1984 .

[33]  Reza Moinpour,et al.  Managerial Judgment in Marketing: The Concept of Expertise , 1983 .

[34]  J. Bettman,et al.  Knowledge Structure Differences between More Effective and Less Effective Salespeople , 1988 .

[35]  Robert J. Sternberg,et al.  Practical intelligence in real-world pursuits: The role of tacit knowledge. , 1985 .

[36]  P. Slovic.  Analyzing the expert judge: A descriptive study of a stockbroker's decision process. , 1969 .

[37]  Barton A. Weitz.  Effectiveness in sales interactions: A contingency framework. , 1981 .

[38]  A. Zellner.  An Efficient Method of Estimating Seemingly Unrelated Regressions and Tests for Aggregation Bias , 1962 .