Experimental Investigation of Human Decision Processes in Portfolio Decision Analysis

Master's Thesis from the year 2013 in the subject Psychology - Miscellaneous, grade: 1.7, Technical University of Munich (Lehrstuhl für Technische Dienstleistungen und Operations Management), course: Technische Dienstleistungen und Operations Management, language: English, abstract: Till now operations management mainly dealt with finding appropriate models to facilitate decision making processes, but these theoretical concepts did not always help to deal with actual processes in practice. Thus the understanding of human behaviour becomes more and more important. Furthermore the behavioural aspect of the decision making process plays a big role, as everyone of us would face resource allocation situations or portfolio decisions and people always do not make optimal decisions as mathematical models would do, but rather a completely another way often based on heuristics. Therefore it is interesting to investigate how people tackle such decision making situations intuitively and which cognitive strategies they follow thereby.

This work aims to give a detailed overview about the relating literatures at first. Then decision making processes in portfolio decision situations are experimentally investigated regarding to behavioural aspects, in this case concerning knapsack problems, with the application of the methodology verbal protocol analysis. Concrete heuristics which subjects were following during the decision process could be identified and classified under the terms of certain criterions for further analysis. Hereby verbal protocol analysis helped to collect good and applicable data for determining specific behaviour of people in portfolio decision processes.