NUDGES: an assisted strategy for improving heuristic decision in PGE-Product Generation Engineering

Abstract

Heuristic decisions are automatically made during the whole product development processes to find solutions, when information and time are limited. Heuristic decisions are a simple process and give a fast response. However, they can lead to decision-making errors because of heuristic traps such as social bias and representativeness. Thus, it is important to investigate strategies to reduce such bias. One strategy that influences decision making is the nudging strategy, which is applied in behavioural economics, politics and healthcare. This research investigates whether the results of utility analysis change when elements of the nudging strategy are integrated in the method. The study was performed in a workshop with an automotive company. The workshop aimed at specifying functions of a tool for the selection and guided processing of development methods in daily activities. Therefore, different possible tool features had to be evaluated regarding i.a. expected value and required effort for different stakeholders and technical feasibility. Hence, many decisions were made during the workshop, such as rating the importance of different stakeholders and evaluating tool functions. The elements “Feedback”, “Incentive” and “Structure complex” of the nudging strategy were applied in some parts of the workshop to test, if they could change the decision behaviour, which is under the influence of e.g. self-serving bias, representativeness and positive effect. It could be observed that applying the elements from the nudging strategy changed results in general. For example: After getting Feedback about the group average result of a first rating round, the individual estimations regarding the share of a certain stakeholder in the company were closer to the group average in the second round (p<0.01). The final results were additionally influenced by calculation schemes which reduced the visibility of decision changes in the final result. However, the overall evaluation of some features was still affected.