Abstract
Humans are required to find a suitable trade-off between making informed decisions on the one hand and
limiting invested resources such as time and effort on the other hand. In this talk, I will present empirical work
on the interaction between attention allocation and preference formation, suggesting that humans balance
accuracy and effort by searching systematically for relevant information in an efficient and goal-directed, but
not strictly optimal manner. Based on this notion, I will then present a Bayesian cognitive model of information
search in multi-attribute decisions. The core element of this model is a search rule, according to which an
attribute is most likely to be attended next if it is expected to reveal decisive information in favour of its
associated option. I will show that the model accounts for a rich body of empirical findings on attention-choice
interactions in both binary and multi-alternative decisions and that alternative search rules fail to capture these
findings.