Decision theory

Decision theory

"Decision theory is an interdisciplinary area of study, related to and of interest to practitioners in mathematics, statistics, economics, philosophy, management and psychology. It is concerned with how real decision-makers make decisions, and with how optimal decisions can be reached." (Wikipedia, 2005).

Decision theory is also relevant for Library and Information Science (LIS) because information seeking is about making decisions and vice versa: making decisions is about selecting and using information.

A central issue in decision theory is the investigation of subjective propability: That persons ("users") tend to have systematic bias in their statistical evaluations and decisions.

Bookstein & Swanson (1975) have put forward an influencial theory on indexing based on decision theory. The phenomenon "anchoring" is an example of a concept from decision theory which might be applied to information retrieval:

"In many situations people estimate an unknown value by starting from some initial value which is then adjusted to yield a final answer. The initial value or starting point may be suggested by formulation of the problem, or it may be the result of a partial computation. Whatever the source of the initial value, adjustments are typically insufficient. That is, different starting points yield estimates which are biased toward the initial value. The phenomenon is called anchoring".

Within information retrieval "anchoring" is the tendency to stick the the original point of departure. (See Blair, 1990, 14-18; cf., label effect).

Literature:

Blair, D. C. (1990). Language and Representation in Information Retrieval. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Bookstein, A. & Swanson, D. R. (1975). A decision theoretic foundation for indexing. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 26(1), 45-50.

Hogarth, R. (1987). Judgement and Choice. The Psychology of Decision. 2. ed. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.

MacGregor, D.; Lichtenstein, S. & Slovic, P. (1988). Structering Knowledge Retrieval: An Analysis of Decomposed Quantitative Judgments. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 42, 303-323.

Thompson, P. (1988). Subjective probability and information retrieval: A review of the psychological literature. Journal of Documentation, 44(2), 119-143.

Tversky, A & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgement under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Science, 185, 1124-1131.

Tversky, A. (1974). Assessing Uncertainty. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (series B, Methodology), 36(2), 148-159.

Wikipedia. The free Encyclopedia. (2005). Decision theory. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_theory

Birger Hjørland

Last edited: 21-01-2006

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