Citation

Yager RR, Kikuchi S. IEEE Trans. Syst. Man. Cybern. B Cybern. 2004; 34(2): 1224-1234.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2004, IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers))

DOI

10.1109/TSMCB.2003.822280

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

We focus on situations in which we must decide on what time to take an action. The action is not in question it is the time of action. We call these "time for action decisions," a prototypical example being deciding when to leave on a journey. We point out that during this type of decision process, the decision-maker recognizes two groups of forces acting on him: one that pushes him to act now and other that pushes him act later. We note that the strength of these forces depends on the information available about various uncertainties associated with the situation. It also strongly depends upon the personality of the decision-maker. We observe that as time passes these conflicting forces tend to build up an anxiety in the decision-maker resulting in an action being taken at a time of most intense anxiety. In this paper using the ideas of possibility and necessity measures to enable different interpretations of uncertain information we investigate the temporal profile of the decision-maker's anxiety as a function of their decision attitude. We investigate the role of maximization of anxiety as decision paradigm. One of our goals here is to try to understand role of the nature and the quality information plays in these types of decisions as well as its interaction with anxiety.