Abstract
Purpose of the study: Leisure travel, typically undertaken once per year as relief from employment, is recognized as contributory to life quality. Biased travel decisions can result in quality of life opportunity costs. It is important to understand the sources of these costs and how they can be mitigated.
Design/methodology/approach: Within subjects design: 50 adults were presented, sequentially, with two tasks concerning a choice of travel alternatives. The first set solicited their judgment about a feature of the alternatives using explicit and implicit judgment-biasing information. The second asked them to form a belief about the alternatives using the first set plus additional plausible or contradictory information. Then the preservation of judgment biases were tracked forward.
Findings: Travel related judgments and decisions were demonstrated to be susceptible to a wide range of decision and judgment heuristic biases. As expected, the susceptibility depended to a significant degree on the availability of corroborating or contradicting information. Judgment biases were observed to be preserved and represented in subjects' subsequent formulation of belief functions, but depended on the starkness and credibility of the second set of information and, if probabilistic, how the information was represented. However, initial, biased judgments formed in the first judgment task showed a general preservation when the information was migrated forward into a "alternative selection" decision.
Originality/value: Two lines of scientific inquiry that have recently acquired much experimental and theoretical attention and credibility and hold potential for improving quality of life type decision making: Behavioral economics, viz., decision heuristic biases; and statistical belief functions. These two theoretical areas are not adequately integrated. Belief functions are suspected of being susceptible to decision heuristic biases. The present research evaluates the suspicion and relates it to quality of life decisions.
Research limitations/implications: The scenarios constructed, and about which subjects were asked to formulate judgments and beliefs, were fictional, and it can be argued that subjects would behave differently if judging an actual travel decision.
Practical implications: Travel decisions and purchases must typically be made in advance of consumption, and judgment biases surely come into play. Awareness of such biases can improve travelers' decision making and lead marketers to responsibly communicate offerings.