Investigating Serial Position Effects in Sequential Group Decision Making

Group decision making is performed in real life for the purpose of selecting an optimal solution for the whole group. Decision making behavior of group members could be impacted by item domains and the chronological order in which decision tasks are presented to groups. In this paper, we analyze situations where group members could apply different decision strategies depending on the chronological order of decision tasks. The data analysis results confirm that item domains and the order of decision tasks have an impact on group decision strategies. This is especially the case if preferences of a minority of group members are significantly different from the other group members and when decision tasks related to high-involvement item domains are arranged before decision tasks related to low-involvement item domains. In addition, we also figured out that group members invest different amounts of time in making a decision task depending on its position in a sequence of decision tasks.