Decision-making strategies and performance among seniors

Using paper and pencil experiments administered in senior centers, we examine decision-making performance in multi-attribute decision problems. We differentiate the effects of declining cognitive performance and changing cognitive process on decision-making performance of seniors as they age. We find a significant decline in performance with age due to reduced reliance on common heuristics and increased decision-making randomness among our oldest subjects. However, we find that increasing the number of options in a decision problem increases the number of heuristics brought to the task. This challenges the choice overload view that people give up when confronted with too much choice.

► We examine multi-attribute decision making among seniors.
► Decision-making acumen decreases with age.
► The number of used heuristics decreases with age eventually resembling random choice.
► Seniors use more heuristics as task complexity increases.