Why Do Simple Heuristics Perform Well in Choices with Binary Attributes?

What is it about?

This article explains why using one attribute or just adding attributes performs, in many cases, (almost) as well as using the full weighted multi-attribute function. The explanation literally uses just counting, which mathematicians call combinatorics.

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Why is it important?

It has been a long standing puzzle in decision analysis why simple heuristics continue to be used. Robin Hogarth and others had shown that a reason might be that these heuristics perform well in some cases. But we still did not understand why. Now we do (much better than before at least).

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