The Use of Initial Filters to Direct Search in Decision Processes

When looking for a valuable resource, many people use information from the Internet as a way of choosing a small number of offers to investigate in more detail. This paper considers strategies based on the filtering of initial information. A new model is presented according to which the goal of the decision maker is to maximise her expected reward from search taking into account the search costs. The effectiveness of strategies based on filtering is compared to sequential search based on a threshold and exhaustive search of a chosen number of items.