DbS

Decision by Sampling (DbS)

Decision by Sampling (DbS) is a cognitive process-based theory of decision making originally developed by Neil Stewart, Nick Chater, and Gordon D. A. Brown (not to be confused with the former British prime minister).  DbS provides an account of magnitude evaluation based on memory sampling and relative judgment.  In doing so, it departs from the utility-based approaches typically encountered in psychology and economics, in that it does not rely on stable, underlying value representations to explain valuation and choice, or on choice behavior to derive value functions.  Instead, preferences emerge spontaneously from the distributions of sampled events that people observe and the relative nature of the evaluation process.

 Papers & Chapters related to Decision-by-Sampling Theory:

Stewart, N., Chater, N., & Brown, G. D. A. (2006). Decision by sampling. Cognitive Psychology, 53, 1-26.

Brown, G. D. A., Gardner, J., Oswald, A.J., & Qian, J. (2008). Does wage rank affect employees' well-being? Industrial Relations, 47, 355-389.

Stewart, N., & Simpson, K. (2008). A decision-by-sampling account of decision under risk. In N. Chater & M. Oaksford (Eds.), The probabilistic mind: Prospects for Bayesian cognitive science (pp. 261-276). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Stewart, N. (2009). Decision by sampling: The role of the decision environment in risky choice. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 62, 1041-1062.

Olivola, C. Y., & Sagara, N. (2009). Distributions of observed death tolls govern sensitivity to human fatalities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 106, 22151–22156.  (Click here for link to paper)

Boyce, C. J., Brown, G. D. A., & Moore, S. C. (2010). Money and happiness: Rank of income, not income, affects life satisfaction. Psychological Science, 21, 471-475.

Kornienko, T. (2011). A cognitive basis for context-dependent utility: An adaptive magnitude evaluation approach. Working paper, University of Edinburgh.

Ungemach, C., Stewart, N., & Reimers, S. (2011). How incidental values from the environment affect decisions about money, risk, and delay. Psychological Science, 22, 253–260.

Brown, G. D. A., & Matthews, W. J. (2011). Decision by sampling and memory distinctiveness: Range effects from rank-based models of judgment and choice. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 299(1)-299(4).

Olivola, C. Y., & Chater, N. (2017). Decision by sampling: Connecting preferences to real-world regularities. In M. N. Jones (Ed.) Big Data in Cognitive Science. New York: Taylor and Francis.  (Click here for link to paper)