A * B = C or Assets * Burn-rate = Costs? Abstract vs. Context Framing and Strategic Decision Making Performance

18.06.2026 12:00 – 13:00

MANAGEMENT BROWN BAG SEMINAR

ABSTRACT

Strategic decision making balances uniqueness and generality: managers must craft context-specific actions while abstracting from past cases to identify transferable patterns. Whether contextualizing or abstracting information improves decision performance remains an open question. We investigate this via a laboratory NK task where holding information content and complexity fixed, we vary whether the search task is framed either abstractly (factors A, B, C) or contextually (adapted Lemonade Stand). In pre-tests, we find that context leads people shift their attention on the optimization of individual factors instead of patterns, reducing overall search performance (vice versa for abstract framing). This, however, only holds for the presence of interdependencies in the search task. If interdependencies are not present, the context framing helps people more than the abstract. Further finding, across both settings (independent and interdependent) people in the abstract framing learn more (have a steeper improvement function) over multiple games. Our findings contribute to research on strategic decision-making by showing that strategy problem representation is not merely a presentational choice but a structural one: what matters is not whether a framing feels familiar, but whether it activates the correct beliefs about how decision variables interact.

Lieu

Bâtiment: Uni Mail

Boulevard du Pont-d'Arve 40
1205 Geneva

Room M 3383, 3rd floor

entrée libre