Recognition Primed Decision Making in E-commerce

Recognition-primed decision making has been used to describe the behavior of experts in naturalistic environments. A significant body of research has led to the conclusion that RPD models describe decision making in environments characterized by time pressure, competing and/or changing goals and uncertainty. This paper compares the results of several new studies that investigated decision making in the e-commerce environment to what would have been predicted by the RPD model. These environments share some of the characteristics with traditional RPD application areas, but have more variability in terms of the expertise of the decision maker. Results show that RPD models can be used to explain e-commerce behavior, but further research is necessary to draw confident conclusions.