Focusing Failures in Competitive Environments: Explaining Decision Errors in the Monty Hall Game, the Acquiring a Company Problem, and Multiparty Ultimatums

Authors

Avishalom Tor, Harvard Law School, Harvard University
Max Bazerman, Harvard Business School, Harvard University

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2003

Publication Information

16 J. Behav. Decision Making 353 (2003)

Abstract

This paper offers a unifying conceptual explanation for failures in competitive decision-making across three seemingly unrelated tasks: the Monty Hall game (Nalebuff, 1987), the Acquiring a Company problem (Samuelson & Bazerman, 1985), and multiparty ultimatums (Messick, Moore, & Bazerman, 1997). We argue that the failures observed in these three tasks have a common root. Specifically, due to a limited focus of attention, competitive decision-makers fail properly to consider all of the information needed to solve the problem correctly. Using protocol analyses, we show that competitive decision-makers tend to focus on their own goals, often to the exclusion of the decisions of the other parties, the rules of the game, and the interaction among the parties in light of these rules. In addition, we show that the failure to consider these effects explains common decision failures across all three games. Finally, we suggest that this systematic focusing error in competitive contexts can serve to explain and improve our understanding of many additional, seemingly disparate, competitive decision-making failures.

Comments

Avishalom Tor joined the faculty at Notre Dame Law School in 2011.

Recommended Citation

Avishalom Tor & Max Bazerman, Focusing Failures in Competitive Environments: Explaining Decision Errors in the Monty Hall Game, the Acquiring a Company Problem, and Multiparty Ultimatums, 16 J. Behav. Decision Making 353 (2003).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship/1515