MIT Sloan Prof. John Hauser

When you buy a house, it would be irrational to search every possible house on the market. Instead, you narrow down your choices based on things like price, location, and number of bedrooms. The same thing happens when you buy a car. You might only look at sporty coupes or hybrid vehicles. Everyone has their own individual methods – or heuristic decision rules — for screening products, usually based on the item’s key features.

This presents a significant question for companies:  How do you determine what these decision rules are? Managers are increasingly interested in this topic as companies focus product development and marketing efforts to get consumers to consider their products or prevent them from rejecting the products without evaluation. If they better understood consumers’ heuristic decision rules, they could use this information in the design and marketing of new products.

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