New Approaches Challenging Existing Decision Making Methods

Lack of specific information may be one of the many reasons that make an individual rely on common knowledge, habits, similar previous experiences, religion or stereotypes when faced with a new decision. Culture encodes much of such information. Many differences in behavior are attributed to culture. It is not hard to see the need for a new approach to decision making that takes into account the cultural differences. The importance of taking into account these cultural differences manifests in many dimensions of software development and design. The topic is very novel among computer scientists and there is a rapidly growing body of literature on the cultural issues related to how people interact with computers but few have attempted to computationally model cultural decision making paradigm. Since this project shows such effort, the proposal’s potential contribution is aimed at “Human and Social Dynamics” challenge area but its application can be beneficial for the ongoing research conducted in “Behavioral targeting and social network advertising” and “Computational Advertisement” groups at Yahoo. For example the calculation of the utility based on the culture of the consumers would be a good indicator of the desirability of an option for a consumer.