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18 How people make decisions involving multiple objectives
The lexicographic strategy 3
In the last two heuristics the decision maker either selects attributes at
random or uses attributes that have been used to make the decision in the
past. However, in some circumstances the decision maker may be able
to rank the attributes in order of importance. For example, in choosing
a car, price may be more important than size, which in turn is more
important than top speed. In this case the decision maker can employ
the lexicographic heuristic. This simply involves identifying the most
important attribute and selecting the alternative which is considered to
be best on that attribute. Thus the cheapest car will be purchased. In the
event of a ‘tie’ on the most important attribute, the decision maker will
choose the option which performs best on the second most important
attribute (size), and so on. This ordering of preferences is analogous to
the way in which words are ordered in a dictionary – hence the name
lexicographic. For example, consider the words bat and ball. They both
‘tie’ on the first letter and also tie on the second letter, but on the third
letter ball has precedence.
Like the earlier heuristics the lexicographic strategy involves little
information processing (i.e. it is cognitively simple) if there are few
ties. Despite this, like the recognition heuristic it can work well in
certain environments – for example, when one attribute is considerably
more important than any of the others or where information is scarce.
However, when more information is available, the decision will be based
on only a small part of the available data. In addition, the strategy is
non-compensatory. With deeper reflection, a decision maker might have
preferred an option that performed less well on the most important
attribute because of its good performance on other attributes. 4
The semi-lexicographic strategy 3
This differs slightly from the lexicographic strategy in that, if the performance
of alternatives on an attribute is similar, the decision maker
considers them to be tied and moves on to the next attribute. For
example, when you go shopping you might adopt the following semilexicographic
decision strategy: ‘If the price difference between brands
is less than 50 cents choose the higher quality product, otherwise choose
the cheaper brand.’ Consider the alternatives below.
Brand Price Quality
A $3.00 Low
B $3.60 High
C $3.40 Medium