Abstract

To minimize the cost of making decisions, an agent should use criteria to sort alternatives and each criterion should sort coarsely. To decide on a movie, for example, an agent could use one criterion that orders movies by genre categories, another by director categories, and so on, with a small number of categories in each case. The agent then needs to aggregate the criterion orderings, possibly by a weighted vote, to arrive at choices. As criteria become coarser (each criterion has fewer categories) decision-making costs fall, even though an agent must then use more criteria. The most efficient option is consequently to select the binary criteria with two categories each. This result holds even when the marginal cost of using additional categories diminishes to 0. The extensive use of coarse criteria in practice may therefore be a result of optimization rather than cognitive limitations. Binary criteria also generate choice functions that maximize rational preferences: decision-making efficiency implies rational choice.

中文翻译：

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粗略，有效的决策

摘要

为了最大程度地降低决策成本，座席应使用标准对备选方案进行分类，每个标准应进行粗略分类。例如，要决定电影，代理商可以使用一种标准，该标准按类型类别对电影进行排序，按导演类别对电影进行排序，依此类推，每种情况下的类别数量很少。然后，代理可能需要通过加权表决来汇总标准排序，以得出选择。随着准则变得更粗糙（每个准则具有更少的类别），即使代理必须使用更多准则，决策成本也会下降。因此，最有效的选择是选择每个都有两个类别的二进制标准。即使使用其他类别的边际成本减少到0时，该结果仍然成立。因此，在实践中广泛使用粗略标准可能是优化而不是认知局限的结果。二元标准还产生最大化理性偏好的选择功能：决策效率意味着理性选择。