Is Decision Making Rational and General?-The Optimising Model of Decision Making

A unifying and optimising model of decision making is presented in this paper. The model is based on two hypotheses: that there is one general strategy of decision making which can recreate many specific strategies depending on some environmental parameters, and that human decision making is rational if we take into account all cognitive limitations, features of the environment and the task that an agent actually attempts to solve. Testing of the model aimed to verify specific hypotheses about the match between the model’s predictions and the empirical data and the existence of some phenomena expected due to the workings of the model’s hypothetical mechanism, as well as the aforementioned general hypotheses about decision making. The model’s performance has been found to be consistent with subjects’ results. Particularly, the model has a better match to data than other related models.