Decision Making Under Complexity

Dear Colleagues,

We live in a highly complex society, facing complicated challenges that range from saving for pensions to pricing sustainable investments, and from adopting new technologies to addressing environmental challenges. In many of these situations, decision makers (individual households, fund managers, organizations, or governments) often find the decision environment or the choice options in the decision environment too complex and struggle to find the right decision.

When decision makers perceive complexity, they may not consider all relevant information but direct their attention to salient features. This biased information processing increases the likelihood of decision errors, making choices noisier and, in many cases, systematically biased. For example, they may behave cautiously by sticking to the default, postponing their decisions if possible, changing their minds when facing the same decision, using less costly but error-prone heuristics, or opting for satisficing instead of maximizing.

This Special Issue explores the consequences of complexity in decision making using insights from game theory, economics, psychology, and neuroscience. Topics include, but are not limited to, the following: 

Complexity in strategic interaction and games: The impact of complexity on coordination, competition, and cooperation in multi-agent settings.

Complexity and individual decision making: How cognitive limitations, heuristics, and procedural decision-making shape behavior in complex environments.

Conceptualization and measurement of complexity: Theoretical approaches, formal models, and empirical measures of decision complexity in economics and beyond.

Complexity and behavioral anomalies: Revisiting classic biases (e.g., winner’s curse, default effects, procrastination, preference reversals, loss aversion) through the lens of decision complexity.

Policy design and complexity: How policy complexity affects comprehension, uptake, and effectiveness in areas such as pensions, taxation, health care, and climate policy.

Markets, organizations, and complexity: The role of complexity in pricing sustainable investments, adoption of innovations, organizational decision processes, and market responses.

Cross-disciplinary perspectives on complexity: Insights from psychology, neuroscience, and computer science on how agents perceive, process, and cope with complex choice environments.

Tools and interventions to manage complexity: Nudges, simplification strategies, digital tools, and institutional designs that help decision makers navigate complex environments.

Dr. Jianying Qiu
Prof. Dr. Zhihua Li
Guest Editors

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