For many decades, research in judgment and decision making has examined behavioral violations of rational choice theory. In that framework, rationality is expressed as a single correct decision shared by experimenters and subjects that satisfies internal coherence within a set of preferences and beliefs. Outside of psychology, social scientists are now debating the need to modify rational choice theory with behavioral assumptions. Within psychology, researchers are debating assumptions about errors for many different definitions of rationality. Alternative frameworks are being proposed. These frameworks view decisions as more reasonable and adaptive that previously thought. For example, "rule following." Rule following, which occurs when a rule or norm is applied to a situation, often minimizes effort and provides satisfying solutions that are "good enough," though not necessarily the best. When rules are ambiguous, people look for reasons to guide their decisions. They may also let their emotions take charge. This chapter presents recent research on judgment and decision making from traditional and alternative frameworks.

When deciding when to make a purchase, people often compare their outcomes to those that would have occurred had they purchased earlier or later. In this article, we examine how pre-and postpurchase comparisons affect regret and satisfaction, and whether consumers learn to avoid decisions that result in regret. In the first two experiments, we show that information learned after the purchase has a greater impact on satisfaction than information learned before the purchase. In addition, negative price comparisons have a greater impact on satisfaction than positive comparisons. These results imply that if consumers who receive postpurchase information wish to avoid future feelings of regret, they should defer their purchases longer. Our second two experiments demonstrate this phenomenon: Subjects who were exposed to postchoice information set higher decision thresholds, consistent with the minimization of future regret. Paradoxically, providing subjects with additional postchoice information resulted in decreased average earnings, suggesting that consumers may try to avoid future regret even when doing so conflicts with expected value maximization.

Electronic agents help consumers locate new products and generate demand by recommending products with which consumers may be unfamiliar. We explore the effects of these unfamiliar recommendations by addressing the following questions: (1) How do unfamiliar recommendations affect consumers' attitudes towards the agent? (2) How does information about familiar recommendations alter consumers' attitudes toward unfamiliar alternatives and toward the agent? (3) How does item-specific information about unfamiliar alternatives moderate the effect of familiar recommendations? Through three studies using simulated music CD shopping agents, we show that: (1) unfamiliar recommendations lower agent evaluations, (2) familiar recommendations create a context that can raise the attractiveness of unfamiliar recommendations and the agent, and (3) the effects of contextual recommendations can be reversed by item-specific information. Furthermore, we show a dissociation between recommendation and agent evaluations under some conditions. These results suggest ways to ameliorate the effects of unfamiliarity in Internet product search through the use of appropriate contextual cues. 1The Internet offers consumers access to many alternatives with relatively low search costs. Many authors have suggested that as the amount of information available on the Internet increases, consumers will increasingly turn to particular sites and technologies that can filter and summarize the alternatives (Alba et al. 1997;Maes 1999;West et al. 1999). Electronic agents provide one such technology.