http://yhoo.it/fZzIEq
Kevin O’Connor, the founder of DoubleClick, has launched another website: findthebest.com. The site addresses the challenge users face when researching various products or services of the same type to inform decision making on which to buy. The service covers a variety of topics and pulls data from various resources to provide the user with his or her options. In the third module of the course, we have discussed the importance of structuring decision making processes. Here, the core value of this service is in having structured and automated the annoying and time-consuming task of going from site to site to compare offers. The decisions at issue here are more trivial than those discussed in class, but this seems to be an example of the value of structuring decision making nonetheless.
2 replies on “findthebest.com : structuring decisions”
Findthebest.com currently doesn’t seem to recommend relevant schools outside those a parent has already selected. To increase the potential of making the best decision it would be helpful for parent to see schools that are not similar to those they’ve selected; an automated Devil’s Advocate of sorts.
The decision space is a really interesting one, not least because even your decision about what decision-making process to use is already a value-laden choice. For personal use, tools like Findthebest.com (and more open-ended ones like 1000minds.com) optimize for decision quality at the expense of happiness. This might sound like a counterintuitive claim, but research indicates that “satisficing” behavior (selecting the first satisfactory option) leads to greater personal satisfaction than “optimizing” behavior (trying to optimize among a comprehensive set of options). Consider the opposite type of tool: http://justbuythisone.com/, which restricts the decision space to maximize happiness for the decider.
(That said, the goal of decisionmaking in a company is usually to maximize decision quality, not the happiness of its decisionmakers, so this line of reasoning is less relevant in a corporate context.)