Marketing decision support system openness: A means of improving managers' understanding of marketing phenomena

Previous research has shown that managers offered the opportunity to use MDSS perform better but are not more confident about their decision. The performance increase seems to result from a reliance effect rather than from a better understanding of the decision problem. By conducting a laboratory experiment in a marketing environment with experienced and inexperienced subjects, we find that enhancing the MDSS openness decreases the reliance effect but does not have an impact on the decision-makers' evaluation of their decisions.