Measures for Quantitative Process-Tracing Methods

To know the decision strategy and the underlying information acquisition behavior of a person is essential for the design of computer programs that support managerial and consumer decision making. Both quantitative methods (e.g. computer-assisted process-tracing systems) and qualitative methods (e.g. verbal protocols) are used to investigate information acquisition behavior of managers and consumers, respectively, and to detect their decision strategies. This article presents measures that allow for the detection of important decision strategies—that is, one is able to distinguish decision strategies from each other. The presented measures are the methodological basis of widely used quantitative process-tracing methods such as computerized process-tracing (CPT) tools or eye-tracking systems. The article concludes that the measures and their application within CPT tools or eye-tracking systems constitute the basic foundation of an emerging research field called clickstream analysis, which is a method to investigate human decision processes by analyzing computer log files.