Foresightful investment analysts have long recognized the need to understand more clearly the detailed processes underlying investment decisions-especially decisions made by acknowledged experts. For example, Bernhard observes that, if the mental processes of consistently successful investors are intuitional, that intuitional reasoning must be made understandable.' In a similar vein, others have argued that, by compelling the investment analyst to translate his vague attitudes, opinions, and reasons into explicit quantities, the analyst's thoughts are brought out into the open where they can be observed, evaluated, and tested.2 Researchers in the areas of economics, finance, and psychology have recently taken up the challenge of simulating and describing the judgment process. There are, at present, a number of methods that should be of interest to persons concerned with the dynamics of investment decisions. The objective of this paper is to provide a brief introduction to this work and to present an experiment that illustrates the use of one such method for quantitatively describing the use of information in investment decisions. Due to limitations of the sample of subjects and the particular cases being judged, the reader should view the experiment as a methodological illustration-not a finished empirical investigation.
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