Influence Of Methodology And Human Behaviour On Product Selection Process

The e-scouting process of a product, whose features are known by catalogue, requires resources that are dedicated to supply and can result in an inefficient and ineffective process. Behavioural experiments were performed in order to simulate the selection process of a mass consumption product by a set of buyers. The experiment results show that if quantitative product features are limited in a range of variation, according to the decision making strategy, the results of human decision maker evaluation substantially coincide with those obtained by a virtual decision maker that follows the same strategy based on an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) [1]. On the contrary the difference among human and virtual decision makers is considerable when quantitative product characteristics are unknown or not strictly limited; as regards to the above mentioned scenario, the e-scouting process can be improved by using AHP methodology only if decision making process is automated.