Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/bdm.465 Search Strategies in Decision Making: The Success of ‘‘Success’’

Examination of search strategies has tended to focus on choices determined by decision makers ’ personal preferences among relevant cues, and not on learning cue-criterion relationships. We present an empirical and rational analysis of cue search for environ-ments with objective criteria. In such environments, cues can be evaluated on the basis of three properties: validity (the probability that a cue identifies the correct choice if cue values differ between alternatives); discrimination rate (the proportion of occasions on which a cue has differing values); and success (the expected proportion of correct choices when only that cue can be used). Our experiments show that though there is a high degree of individual variability, success is a key determinant of search. Further-more, a rational analysis demonstrates why success-directed search is the most adaptive strategy in many circumstances. Copyright # 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. key words search strategies; heuristics; cue hierarchies, adaptive behaviors When faced with a decision it is often impossible to consider all of the options, their attributes and their potential consequences simultaneously, so we must do so sequentially. The order that we adopt to dictat