Classification of Human Decision Behavior: Finding ModularDecision Rules with Genetic Algorithms

The understanding of human behavior in sequential decision tasks is im-portant for economics and socio-psychological sciences. In search tasks,for example when individuals search for the best price of a product, theyare confronted in sequential steps with different situations and they haveto decide whether to continue or stop searching. The decision behavior ofindividuals in such search tasks is described by a search strategy.This paper presents a new approach of finding high-quality searchstrategies by using genetic algorithms (GAs). Only the structure of thesearch strategies and the basic building blocks (price thresholds and pricepatterns) that can be used for the search strategies are pre-specified.[...]