How People Handle Available Information in Making Decisions: An Experimental Study

The focus of much research in behavioral decision theory on individual behavior in static and discrete tasks has limited the penetration of psychological perspectives in theories of aggregate dynamics such as the behavior of markets, firms, and other economic systems. In the paper, an experiment in a simple social-ecological system is designed to investigate how people develop intentions and handle information feedback. The aim is to test that if more available information would help in making decisions. Statistic analysis results show that people do perform better when given more information. But the performance is still far from the optimal solution.