Modeling Decision Heuristics

The engineering of human decisions should be based on models that (i) require realistic amounts of resources such as time, information, and computation; (ii) have high predictive accuracy; (iii) describe the decisions people make and the processes that lead to the decisions; and (iv) are easy to understand, apply, and explain. Fast and frugal heuristics are a family of simple algorithmic models of decision making that satisfy (i)–(iv). Theoretical analyses, data from laboratory experiments, and applications of the heuristics “in the wild” are presented. A future research direction is to develop a methodology for building technological interfaces based on fast and frugal heuristics.