Sexual selection depends on differential patterns of mate preference and choice. Little attention has been paid, however, to the manner in which individuals acquire information about the quality of potential mates and how this information is used to form mating decisions. Different decision rules for determining mating preferences often lead to different fitness consequences for the actively searching and choosy sex. In this paper, I compare the expected fitness consequences of two alternative decision-making strategies: a best-of-n strategy (whereby searching individuals choose the best mate from a sample of size n) and a strategy based on sequential sampling (whereby the searching individual establishes a critical mate quality and continues searching until encountering a mate at or above this quality). For the same distribution of potential mate qualities, the sequential-search strategy generates higher expected fitness gains than the best-of-n strategy. This is in contrast to earlier conclusions (e.g.,...