In our daily lives we make many decisions. In academic disciplines that are involved with decision making there is a tendency to treat each of the decision problems that people face in isolation and analyze what is the best choice to make. However, because we face many problems simultaneously we must decide how to allocate our scarce time or attention across these problems and this time-allocation problem is relatively understudied. This research project is concerned with how decision makers allocate their time across both individual decision making tasks as well as tasks involving strategic choices when people engage in games with others.

For example, consider a sales manager in a complex organization. On a given day, she has to decide the sales strategy, motivate her team to implement it, report the strategy to the sales director and discuss with other managers what she will need from them in order to implement the strategy. When deciding the sales strategy, she has to consider the sales strategies of other companies in the market. When meeting with her team, she has to provide the right incentives to motivate her team to carry out the sales strategy. When reporting the strategy to the sales director, she has to be persuasive and argue in favor of her choice, which might involve strategically selecting what to highlight to get the director's approval. When talking with other managers, she has to use her bargaining skills to get the support she will need from the other teams.  Therefore, when planning her workday, the manager has to estimate how much time to spend on each of these strategic tasks.

Similar problems, albeit in a non-strategic environment, occur when students have to allocate their time and attention across the different classes they are taking. Evidence exists that many of the difficulties that students run into are not related to their innate abilities but rather to their time management and attention allocation. The same is true of students taking standardized or other types of tests where knowledge of the material may play a secondary role to test taking strategies in the form of time allocation across sections of the exam. Those who cannot plan their time correctly run out of time and suffer.

In our work we document the fact that people are not very good at solving this time allocation problem by asking them to solve such problems in a controlled laboratory setting. The amount of time they think they will need to solve a problem many times turns out to be either insufficient or excessive.  When they allocate too little time they run the risk of making poor decisions while if they allocate too much the excess time might be used more productively elsewhere.

As we discover, the reason people fail in their time-allocation task is that the things they concentrate on while planning their attention allocation are not the same as those they should focus on when actually making the decision. Planned attention does not equal actual attention.  

When allocating time across risky situations or risky decisions we look at two types of problems. In one, which we call a “personal lottery”, the amount of time allocated to a problem can change the probability of success in that task while still keeping the outcome uncertain. For such problems decision makers have to determine the probability of success they will have across these personal lotteries. They are also asked to determine which such lottery they prefer if they had to choose between them. Impersonal lotteries are the standard type of risky decision that decisions theorists investigate where the probability of success cannot be altered by the time allocated to the problem.

One bias we have uncovered in the way people allocate their time in personal lotteries is what we call the “time-choice bias which is a tendency for people to allocate more time to problems or personal lotteries that they prefer. In other words, if people would prefer to engage in personal lottery A rather than personal lottery B, then they tend to allocate more time to A when allocating time across them which may be counter to what is optimal. The assumption that if A is preferred to B then it must be more worthy of time leads to a correlation between preference and time that may be unwise.

Our results may have significance in many areas of life. The fact that people may be lacking in their ability to appropriately allocate their time may impact negatively on the quality of the decisions they make and their welfare. This problem may be more severe than expected since it is not clear that people are aware of their poor time-allocation abilities or of the severity of its consequences.

Last Modified: 10/14/2021
Modified by: Elizabeth R Schotter