Rarely do we acquire an information good after we experience it in its entirety. Individuals learn about a work from partial information (e.g. reviews, word-of-month, summaries and abstracts etc.), therefore the inevitable uncertainty in predicting the content and relevance of a work.
The nature of uncertainty experienced by users is likely to change in a digital environment. While perusing of the content of a work is circumscribed in an online environment, novle deicsion aids such as user reviews and recommender systems are becoming more prevalent to reduce decision uncertainty and promote sereendiptitous information encounters.
The course is designed to explore various aspects of decision making in information consumption. While uncertainty has long been recognized as an important factor in information behavior literature, little has been addressed from the perspective of the uncertainty involved in deciding what information to consume. To provide the students necessary analytic tools for user decision making, a survey of relevant literature in cognitive science, social psychology, HCI, and consumer behaviors will be given, with a special focus on their implications on explaining and predicting information users' decision making.
It is hoped that a better understanding of the process of how users assimilate and combine various information cues in their information environment will provide valuable insights into the design of information services able to reduce search efforts and search uncertainty therefore promote higher user satisfaction.