Several attempts to understand the success of simple decision heuristics have examined heuristics as an approximation to a linear decision rule. This research has identified three environmental structures that aid heuristics: dominance, cumulative dominance, and noncompensatoriness. This paper develops these ideas further and examines their empirical relevance in 51 natural environments. The results show that all three structures are prevalent, making it possible for simple rules to reach, and occasionally exceed, the accuracy of the linear decision rule, using less information and less computation.
['Özgür Şimşek']
Linear decision rule as aspiration for simple decision heuristics