Browsing by Subject "Extreme uncertainty"

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Open Access
Decision-making under extreme uncertainty: Eristic rather than heuristic
(Emerald Publishing Limited, 2023-01-02) Kurdoğlu, Rasim Serdar; Ateş, Y. N.; Lerner, D. A.
Purpose – This paper aims to introduce eristic decision-making in entrepreneurship. A decision is eristically made when it utilizes eristics, which are action-triggering short-cuts that draw on hedonic urges (e.g. sensationseeking). Unlike heuristics, eristic decision-making is not intendedly rational as eristics lead to decision-making without calculating or even considering the consequences of actions. Eristics are adaptive when uncertainty is extreme. Completely novel strategies, nascent venturing, corporate venturing for radical innovation and adapting to shocks (e.g. pandemic) are typically subject to extreme uncertainties. Design/methodology/approach – In light of the relevant debates in entrepreneurship, psychology and decision sciences, the paper builds new conceptual links to establish its theoretical claims through secondary research. Findings – The paper posits that people adapt to extreme uncertainty by using eristic reasoning rather than heuristic reasoning. Heuristic reasoning allows boundedly rational decision-makers to use qualitative cues to estimate the consequences of actions and to make reasoned decisions. By contrast, eristic reasoning ignores realistic calculations and considerations about the future consequences of actions and produces decisions guided by hedonic urges. Originality/value – Current entrepreneurial research on uncertainty usually focuses on moderate levels of uncertainty where heuristics and other intendedly rational decision-making approaches pay off. By contrast, this paper focuses on extreme uncertainty where eristics are adaptive. While not intendedly rational, the adaptiveness of eristic reasoning offers theoretically and psychologically grounded new explanations about action under extreme uncertainty.
Open Access
Eristic reasoning: adaptation to extreme uncertainty
(Frontiers Research Foundation, 2023-02-09) Kurdoğlu, Rasim Serdar; Jekel, M.; Ateş, N. Y.
Heuristics (shortcut solution rules) can help adaptation to uncertainty by leading to sufficiently accurate decisions with little information. However, heuristics would fail under extreme uncertainty where information is so scarce that any heuristic would be highly misleading for accuracy-seeking. Thus, under very high levels of uncertainty, decision-makers rely on heuristics to no avail. We posit that eristic reasoning (i.e., self-serving inferences for hedonic pursuits), rather than heuristic reasoning, is adaptive when uncertainty is extreme, as eristic reasoning produces instant hedonic gratifications helpful for coping. Eristic reasoning aims at hedonic gains (e.g., relief from the anxiety of uncertainty) that can be pursued by self-serving inferences. As such, eristic reasoning does not require any information about the environment as it instead gets cues introspectively from bodily signals informing what the organism hedonically needs as shaped by individual differences. We explain how decision-makers can benefit from heuristic vs. eristic reasoning under different levels of uncertainty. As a result, by integrating the outputs of formerly published empirical research and our conceptual discussions pertaining to eristic reasoning, we conceptually criticize the fast-and-frugal heuristics approach, which implies that heuristics are the only means of adapting to uncertainty.