Effectiveness of security analyst information accessing strategies: A computer interactive assessment

The present study illustrates how computers can substantially extend the range and ease of application of the behavioral process information monitoring procedures that are increasingly being used to capture and preserve traces of pre-decision information accessing behavior. Employing such an extension, the study examined whether better and poorer decision marker performance was related to differences in the extent and content of information accessing behavior. The results of a computer simulation involving practicing financial security analysts engaged in a securities analysis task revealed that the better performing analysts generally considered slightly greater amounts of information and different types of information than did the poorer performing analysts. These findings are interpreted in terms of the concept of "control schemas" postulated by Kozminsky, Kintsch, and Bourne (1981). A concluding section describes numerous ways in which computers improve upon both the flexibility and validity of traditional research paradigms.