A type of emergency decision-making which has not received research attention is the police search for a lost person in a rural or wilderness area. For many such incidents, decisions concerning where to search for the lost subject are made by a planning team, each member of which assigns probabilities to the various hypotheses about where the subject might be located, including the residual hypothesis that the subject is somewhere else entirely, that is, outside of the designated search area. In the current study, 32 adult males with search planning experience were asked to assign probabilities to a fictional lost person incident. It was hypothesized, according to support theory (Tversky & Koehler, 1994), that subjects who first considered the five possible scenarios accounting for how the subject could have left the search area—i.e., unpacked the residual hypothesis—would subsequently increase their probability estimate of the global hypothesis that the missing subject was not in the designated search area, compared to those subjects who unpacked the focal hypothesis. This hypothesis was confirmed. We also found considerable evidence for subadditivity, as most subjects estimated higher summed probabilities for the individual scenarios accounting for the focal and residual hypotheses, respectively. The potential negative consequences of such unpacking effects during a lost person incident were discussed, and possible means of mitigating such effects were described.

Most prior research on the compromise effect has focused on single rather than multiple choices. This research investigates the potential effects of purchase quantity on the compromise effect. We propose that the share of the middle option in a trinary choice set decreases as the purchase quantity increases, because people tend to employ a balance heuristic to distribute their multiple choices among the available options to achieve a balanced state and to satisfy their variety-seeking tendency. Furthermore, we propose that the need for justification and an optimal stimulation level moderate the relationship between the number of purchase items and the compromise effect. These proposed hypotheses are supported by results from three experiments.

Dynamic, connectionist models of decision making, such as decision field theory (Roe, Busemeyer, & Townsend, 2001), propose that the effect of context on choice arises from a series of pairwise comparisons between attributes of alternatives across time. As such, they predict that limiting the amount of time to make a decision should decrease rather than increase the size of contextual effects. This prediction was tested across four levels of time pressure on both the asymmetric dominance (Huber, Payne, & Puto, 1982) and compromise (Simonson, 1989) decoy effects in choice. Overall, results supported this prediction, with both types of decoy effects found to be larger as time pressure decreased.