Collection
Special Issue: Decision Research – Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Behavior
25 years after Kahneman and Tversky published their influential paper on Prospect Theory, there is not only one gap between theory and behavior, but in our view, there are several gaps that current research is trying to bridge. Although considerations of behavioral aspects and cognitive biases are already well established and have a considerable influence on decision analysis and models in some areas like behavioral finance, prescriptive models in many other areas still fail to take these phenomena into account. Furthermore, new gaps between theory and behavior (and empirical observation) have opened within the field of behavioral decision making itself: Observations of actual behavior has led to the development of many different models and theories of decision making, and testing and comparing these theories in view of actual behavior has become an important topic for empirical decision research.
The papers collected in this special issue aim at bridging both gaps: they present examples of behavioral decision research in different application domains like supply chain management or consumer choice, and they aim at testing different theories of behavioral decision making. They also share another common trait: They all point out the importance of context for decision making behavior. This is an important characteristic of behavioral decision models in contrast to prescriptive models. There might be one rational behavior (although even that might depend on the concept and axioms of rationality applied), but there is not just one type of “irrational” behavior that all actors will exhibit under all circumstances. Which behavioral decision rule or which heuristic is applied by a given actor in a given context depends on characteristics of both the actor and the context. The papers collected in this special issue also share the goal of identifying such factors that could influence actual decision behavior in certain situations.
Editors
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Oliver Fabel
Department of Business Administration, University of Vienna, Oskar-Morgenstern-Platz 1, 1090 Vienna, Austria
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Rudolf Vetschera
Department of Business Administration, University of Vienna, Oskar-Morgenstern-Platz 1, 1090 Vienna, Austria
Articles (5 in this collection)
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Decision making styles and the use of heuristics in decision making
Authors (first, second and last of 4)
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