ABSTRACT
In a simulated yard sale task, participants were asked to sell a series of objects, each of which would attract three customers making a randomly determined offer. Participants were told to maximize the total “take” from the sale. The analysis of the data revealed that high-performing naive participants were using a strategy that made them relate the current event to the seemingly irrelevant preceding events. We argue that this strategy is consistent with Simon’s (1982) notion of “satisficing heuristic”, which accounted for both partic ipants’ limited computation capacity and the task environment.
