Decision Making in a Complex Environment: The use of Similarity Judgements to Predict Preferences

Judgments of the relative similarity of pairs of alternatives are used to construct a model of the decision space of a group of college admissions officers. This model is then used to predict the preferences of the officers. The accuracy of the predictions supports the hypothesis that preference judgments are made on the basis of the similarity of given alternatives to an “ideal” alternative. A nonmetric multidimensional scaling procedure is used to construct the space. This procedure yields a dimensional representation based upon very few assumptions about the nature of the similarity measures.