Using behavioral decision theory to assess advertisement recognition tasks by level of difficulty

Studies on human decision making consistently report that people are overconfident about the accuracy of their judgments in discrete-choice tasks. Based on these studies, hypotheses were made about the accuracy with which consumers can judge their own ability to correctly recognize print advertisements. Results of an experiment conducted at three different levels of involvement indicate that subjects are not very good at assessing the accuracy of their recognition judgments, tending to be overconfident at low levels of involvement and possibly underconfident at higher levels. The meaning and implications of these results for managerial decision making within the held of advertising are discussed. (C) 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.