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Poster B in Poster Session B: Tuesday, August 4, 2:00 – 3:45 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

A Minimal Model of Bounded Trade-Off Screening in Multi-Attribute Choice

manisha dubey¹, Anirban Sarkar², Subramanian Ramamoorthy¹; ¹University of Edinburgh, ²Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Presenter: Anirban Sarkar

Human decision-making often involves choosing between multi-attribute alternatives, yet classical models assume fully compensatory utility aggregation despite evidence that people reject options with poor performance on critical attributes. We propose a bounded trade-off reasoning framework in which decisions are governed by a screening process that evaluates the balance between gains and losses across attributes. The model introduces a trade-off tolerance parameter that controls acceptable imbalance and can vary across contexts. Through simulation, we show that this mechanism produces preference patterns that differ from standard utility-based models and captures context-dependent variation in trade-off behavior. These results establish bounded trade-off screening as a plausible computational mechanism for multi-attribute choice and generate testable predictions for future behavioral studies.

Topic Area: Decision-Making, Cognitive Control & Event Cognition