The Effects of Effort-Feedback on Time Spent for Information Processing in Multi-criteria Decision Making

When making decisions, many people tend to rely on their instinctive choices instead of trusting and adopting those suggested by decision support systems. Feedback interventions can be used to subliminally direct and assist decision makers’ attention to increase the accuracy of the decision. This paper seeks to further develop our understanding of such persuasive decision aids for a preferential choice problem. For this purpose, we applied an experiment design with either enabled or disabled feedback interventions in a self-developed computerized decision aid with varying decision complexities. We applied continuous feedback mechanisms using normative rules to evaluate the participants’ time investments during their information processing stage. Our findings demonstrate that normative effort feedback impacts both time spent on single items and time spent for overall decision processing. We conclude that effort feedback can be a viable feedback option to implement in decision aids.