PI: Dr. Özgür Şimşek
Institution: Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungsforschung Berlin
Abstract
The objective of this research project is to study rationality within the context of heuristics. The high-level research questions of
interest are the following: What type of environmental structures enable decision heuristics to be effective? How prevalent are these
structures in our world? And, how do these structures come into existence? Here, I first present a review of the literature, identifying
five factors that allow heuristics to make good decisions: dominance, non-compensating linear structure, flat maximum, robust parameter
estimation in small samples, and effectiveness of a single cue (such as recognition). I then outline four specific objectives for this
research project: 1) Investigate to what extent each of the five factors contribute to heuristic success in real-world environments and
how these factors interact with each other, 2) Investigate heuristic performance in environments that are continuously changing,
3) Investigate how environmental dynamics gives rise to dominance and other structures that enable heuristics to be effective,
4) Specify conditions under which recognition and other universal cues are useful. The project has both analytical and empirical
components, with a focus on understanding heuristic performance in real-world environments. The main underlying theme is to understand
what it means to be rational in an environment that is continuously undergoing changes.
Project-related Publications
Şimşek, Ö. (2013).
Linear decision rule as aspiration for simple decision heuristics. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (pp. 2904-2912).
More publications can be found on this page.