Impact of Missing Information and Strategy on Decision Making Performance

Decision makers frequently encounter environments without perfect information, in which factors such as the distribution of missing information and estimates of missing information significantly impact decision accuracy and speed. This work presents an experiment which modifies an environment with missing information (total information, option imbalance, cue balance) and examines user estimates of the missing information to understand how accuracy and decision speed respond under time pressure. Results indicate that regardless of the way missing information is estimated, certain distributions of missing information reduce decision accuracy. Results from this work also indicate that beyond information distribution and estimation strategy, differences in decision strategy adopted may explain significant differences in decision performance. High performers tend to ignore a greater percentage of information instead of attempting to estimate it, thereby adopting a strategy more heuristic in nature.