Consideration of Strategy-Specific Adaptive Decision Support

The objective of adaptive decision support is to make the decision task easier and to improve the performance of a human’s decision making. In this study, we investigate whether decision support systems should adapt to the strategies used by the decision maker, or if particular decision support designs are effective regardless of the strategy the user is inclined to use. We examine decision support system architecture and system match/mismatch with strategy as independent variables to determine the effects on accuracy, speed, and effort. Human-in-the-loop experimentation was used to determine the efficacy of two decision support architectures, one designed to support heuristic decision making and another to support analytic decision making. Both heuristic and analytic aids, led to faster decision making with no degradation in performance. Both aids also led to improved accuracy over the participants’ baseline performance. In addition, the decision aids led to a drop in information access (a proxy for effort) with no degradation in performance. However, the experiment revealed no interaction effects between decision strategies and aid type. The results of this study should be considered in the design of decision support systems when determining if adding complexity to the system is truly beneficial. A more simplistic decision support tool may be sufficient to help decision makers make faster decisions with no negative impact on performance and to improve the decision making accuracy for users of all archetypes of decision strategies.