ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR AND HUMAN DECISION PROCESSES
Vol. 67, No. 2, August, pp. 222–228, 1996
ARTICLE NO. 0075
The Effects of Time Constraints on the Prechoice
Screening of Decision Options
LEHMAN BENSON III
University of Arizona, Tucson
The purpose of this research was to see if the effects
of time constraints on screening are similar to those
that have been reported for choice: switching to sim-
pler decision strategies and/or speeding up strategy
execution. The first of two studies found that under
time constraints, subjects did not switch strategies but
that some subjects increased the speed of execution
of their existing strategy while others became more
inconsistent in executing their existing strategy. The
second study found that instructions that stressed the
importance of the task led more subjects to speed up
and reduced the number who were inconsistent.
Again, there was no evidence of use of a simpler ver-
sion of the strategy. The results show that, like choice,
screening under time constraints can lead to speeding
up of execution, particularly if the screening decision
is important. However, switching to a simpler strategy,
which occurs in choice, does not appear to occur in
screening. Instead, subjects appear to become less ex-
acting in the execution of their existing screening
strategy, which results in inconsistencies in accep-
tance and rejection of options. q 1996 Academic Press, Inc.
Most decisions are made under time constraints im-
posed by the pace of ongoing events, by explicit dead-
lines, or by others becoming impatient with the deci-
sion maker’s indecisiveness. Previous research has fo-
cused upon the effects of time constraints on choice.
Assuming the two-stage decision procedure described
by Image Theory (Beach, 1990; Beach & Mitchell, 1990,
see also Payne, 1978), in which screening serves to
weed out wholly unacceptable options and choice serves
to select the best from among the survivors of screen-
ing, the present research seeks to see if the previously
obtained results of time constraints on choice also are
obtained for screening.
The effects of time constraints on choice are remarkably
Address correspondence and reprint requests to Professor Lehman
Benson III, Department of Management and Policy, College of Busi-
ness and Public Administration, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ
85721.
0749-5978/96 $18.00
Copyright q 1996 by Academic Press, Inc.
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
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AND LEE ROY BEACH
consistent: decision makers speed up execution of their
decision strategies or switch to simpler strategies, some-
times speeding up after having switched (Eland & Sven-
son, 1993; Maule & Mackie, 1990; Payne, Bettman &
Johnson, 1988; Svenson & Benson, 1993a, 1993b; Sven-
son, Edland, & Slovic, 1990; Svenson & Maule, 1993;
Smith, Mitchell & Beach, 1982; Wright, 1974; Zakay,
1985).
Because choice can be made using either kind of
strategy, switching frequently entails rejecting a com-
pensatory choice strategy for a simpler noncompensa-
tory choice strategy. In contrast, research indicates
that screening is accomplished using one generic non-
compensatory screening strategy called the compatibil-
ity test (reviewed in Beach, 1993). Therefore, time con-
strained subjects have four ways of approaching a
screening task: (1) They can proceed with execution of
the compatibility test as though there were no con-
straints, which should result in a high rate of failures
to complete the task. (2) They can speed up execution
of the compatibility test, which should result in a
higher rate of completion of the task. (3) They can resist
speeding up but execute the compatibility test less
carefully, which should result in inconsistencies— re-
jection of options that otherwise would be accepted and
vice versa. (4) They can resist speeding up but execute
an abbreviated version of the compatibility test, which
should result in completion of the task and consistent
patterns of rejection and acceptance, but not the pat-
terns called for by the unabbreviated version of the
compatibility test. The research problem is to differen-
tiate between inconsistent application and abbreviated
application of the compatibility test, and to differenti-
ate this from the effects of increased speed of execution.
SCREENING
The most systematic research on screening has been
done in the context of Image Theory (Beach, 1990,
1993; Beach & Mitchell, 1990). The results indicate
that it is the failure of options to meet decision makers’
standards, rather than the failure to offer desired out-
222
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 TIME CONSTRAINTS
comes, that leads to their rejection. With such options
out of the way, the decision maker can then move on
to select the best option from among the survivors of
screening.
The Compatibility Test
Screening involves serial consideration of available
options in which each option’s features are compared
to a relevant set of standards. Failures of the option’s
features to meet the standards are called violations,
and the larger the number of violations the less compat-
ible the option is with the decision maker’s standards
and the less acceptable it is as a possible choice. At
some level of incompatibility the option is rejected,
called the rejection threshold. If only one option sur-
vives screening, it becomes the decided-upon option
and choice does not take place. If two or more options
survive screening, the decision maker undertakes to
choose the best from among them.
The research supports the following equation as de-
scriptive of the compatibility test for screening:
n m
I Å ∑ ∑ Wc Vtc , (1)
tÅ1 cÅ1
in which incompatibility, I, is zero when an option has
no violations and decreases (i.e., is more and more neg-
ative) as the number of violations increases; W is the
importance weight for each of the relevant decision
standards; V is a violation of a relevant standard c by
feature t of the candidate (Vtc Å 01 or 0).
The pattern of option rejection and acceptance dic-
tated by this strategy, and the pattern found in all of
the research thus far, consists of the subject retaining
all options that have an I less than some critical value
and rejecting all options that have an I greater than
that value. (Note that I becomes increasingly negative
as violations increase; for ease of communication we
talk of large negative numbers as being larger than
small negative numbers). The critical value of I is the
rejection threshold, and while it differs from one sub-
ject to another, it has been found to be stable for each
individual subject over the duration of an experiment.
Switching
Recall that switching consists of inconsistent or ab-
breviated execution of the compatibility test. Inconsis-
tency would be revealed by the absence of a clear rejec-
tion threshold, i.e., no single value of I below which all
options are retained and above which all options are
rejected. Abbreviation would be revealed by decision
makers examining fewer features of the options. This
would mean that while a subject’s pattern of retentions
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223
and rejections might look inconsistent, it could be ra-
tionalized by presuming an abbreviated version of Eq.
(1). In light of previous research (Benson & Svenson,
1992), we would expect abbreviation to consist of at-
tending to only the most important features or, per-
haps, of attending to only the first features about which
information is received.
Methodologically, differentiating between inconsis-
tencies and abbreviation consists of a subject-by-sub-
ject examination of the pattern of retentions and rejec-
tions. Patterns that show a clear threshold are counted
as full execution of the strategy. Patterns that show no
clear threshold and that cannot be accounted for by
iterative applications of increasingly abbreviated ver-
sions of the strategy are counted as inconsistent execu-
tion of the strategy. Patterns that can be accounted for
by an abbreviated version of the strategy are counted
as an abbreviated execution of the strategy.
Speeding Up
This still leaves the question of how to detect speed-
ing up of strategy execution. Following the lead of Sven-
son and Benson (1993b), the time constraint used in
this experiment was determined by a pretest to see
how long subjects took to perform the screening task
when there was no time constraint. Because the distri-
bution of times was normal, the time constraint for
the experiment was then set at one standard deviation
below the pretest subjects’ mean time. This permits us
to detect speeding up, at the group level, by examining
how many subjects in the time constrained experimen-
tal group actually finished the task within the permit-
ted time. If they executed the strategy at the same
pace as the nonconstrained pretest subjects, we would
expect about 84% of the subjects who do not resort to
abbreviated execution of the strategy to fail to finish
the task. Fewer failures to complete would imply that
at least some of the subjects increased execution speed
in order to compensate for the reduced time for doing
the task.
RESEARCH STRATEGY
Subjects were instructed to screen a set of options
(potential jobs) in anticipation of choosing one job from
among the survivors of screening. One group screened
the jobs without time constraints and another group
did so with time constraints. The hypothesis in Experi-
ment 1 was that more of the time-constrained subjects
would resort to inconsistent or abbreviated execution
of the compatibility test than would the nonconstrained
subjects. In addition, if time-constrained subjects speed
up execution of the compatibility test we would expect
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224 BENSON AND BEACH
fewer than 84% of those who did not resort to abbrevi-
ated execution of the test to fail to complete the task
in the prescribed time.
EXPERIMENT 1
Method
Subjects. Forty-two undergraduate business stu-
dents were each assigned to one of two experimental
groups, a time-constrained group (n Å 19 Ss) or a non-
constrained group (n Å 23 Ss). In addition, there was
a pretest group (n Å 21 Ss).
Procedure. All subjects were told: ‘‘Imagine that
you are a 22 year old, single, student who will soon
graduate with a bachelor’s degree in Marketing. You
have gone to the Placement Center to look at available
jobs. The Center has provided you with descriptions of
8 jobs in marketing, all of which pay the entry level
salary. Each of the jobs is described in terms of 7 fea-
tures: (1) firm size, (2) location, (3) degree creative free-
dom encouraged, (4) degree of administrative responsi-
bility, (4) whether there is an initial training period, (5)
whether extensive travel is required, and (7) amount of
annual vacation granted during the first two years with
the firm.’’
All subjects further were told: ‘‘You have strong re-
quirements in regard to each of these 7 job features:
You want to work for a small firm, preferably in Tuc-
son. You want a high degree of creative freedom, but a
low degree of administrative responsibility until you
have been on the job for a few years. You want an
initial training period so you can more easily fit into
the firm, you want as little travel as possible, and you
want at least 2 weeks of vacation. Of course, you may
not get precisely what you want, but these require-
ments reflect your preferences.’’
All subjects were told: ‘‘In light of your requirements,
please screen the 8 job descriptions, rejecting those that
are of no further interest and retaining those that you
would apply for. Do this by marking one or the other
blank ( Reject or Apply) at the end of each
description.’’ Subjects in the time constrained group
were further told: ‘‘In order to make sure everyone does
the screening part of this task in a timely manner, we
will allow you 2 minutes and 4 seconds to screen all 8
jobs, after which we will, as a group move on to the
second part of the task. When the experimenter gives
the signal, begin screening the jobs. Try to complete
all 8 jobs in the allotted time.’’ After screening was
completed, all subjects were instructed to go back and
choose a job from among those jobs that they had not
rejected. Then they rank-ordered the seven job features
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in terms of their own perceptions about how important
each feature ought to be in screening jobs.
Each job was described on a single sheet of paper by
a list of seven features corresponding to the job seeker’s
seven requirements. The features were always listed
in the same order, and the job’s status was given for
each feature. Thus, for example a job might be de-
scribed by Firm Size: Large; Location: Out of State;
Creative Freedom: High; Administrative Responsibil-
ity: Low; Initial Training: No; Travel: No; Vacation: 1
week. Each feature of a job that was different from the
job seeker’s requirements, listed above, was regarded
as a violation. Table 1 contains the features of each of
the eight jobs, indication of which features are viola-
tions of the job seeker’s requirements (standards), and
the value of I for each job.
Pretest. In order to establish the time constraint for
the main experiment, 21 subjects individually per-
formed the screening part of the task while being
timed. The mean time for completion was 3 min, 11 s.
The distribution of times was roughly normal with a
standard deviation of 1 min, 7 s. Following the practice
prescribed by Svenson and Benson (1993b), one stan-
dard deviation below the mean was adopted as the time
constraint, i.e., 2 min, 4 s to complete the task in the
time-constrained condition of the experiment.
The 23 subjects in the unconstrained (UC) group
screened the eight jobs at their own speed, chose the
best from among the survivors, then ranked the seven
features according to importance. The 19 subjects in
the time constraint (TC) group screened as many of the
eight jobs as they could in 2 min and 4 s, chose the
best of the survivors, and ranked the features according
to their own perceptions of the features’ importance in
job screening. Because subjects nearly always chose as
best the survivor that had the fewest violations, the
choice data are not particularly interesting. This, to-
gether with the fact that choices were not the focus of
the present study, makes it unnecessary to consider
the choice data further.
Results
Let us deal first with the importance rankings. The
rankings were similar for both groups. Each individual
subject’s ranks were treated as weights in equation 1
and I was computed for each of the eight jobs. The
ordering of the jobs was then compared to the ordering
when weights were ignored and violations were merely
counted (01) for each job. For virtually all subjects, the
ordering was the same either way, indicating that the
ranks added little information, a common finding
(Beach & Strom, 1989). This does not necessarily mean
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 TIME CONSTRAINTS 225

TABLE 1
Features of Each of the Eight Jobs

Features

Job Size Location Creativity Admin. Training Travel Vacation I

A Small Tucson High Low Yes No 2 wks 0

B Large Tucson High Low Yes No 2 wks 01
C Small Tucson Low Low Yes No 1 wk 02
D Large Tucson Low Low Yes Yes 2 wks 03
E Large Other High Low No No 1 wk 04
F Large Other High High Yes Yes 1 wk 05
G Large Other Low High No No 1 wk 06
H Large Other Low High No Yes 1 wk 07

Note. Violations of the standards are in italics. The column on the right contains I for each job.

that subjects regarded all features of the jobs as equally
important or that their screening decisions were not
differentially affected by the features. Indeed, research
specifically designed to detect differential weighting is
able to do so (Beach, Puto, Heckler, Naylor, & Marble,
1996). However, because it is a linear equation, the
compatibility test is not sufficiently sensitive to reveal
such effects unless experimental conditions are spe-
cifically designed to do so (Dawes, 1979; Dawes & Corri-
gan, 1974). As a result, even though the rankings are
valuable for the analysis of abbreviated strategy use,
they are not of help for the analysis of inconsistencies
in execution of the compatibility test and we will act
as though the subjects were using unit weights. The
values of I in the right-hand column of Table 1 are
calculated using unit weights.
Inconsistency. When the jobs are listed according
to increasing number of violations (last column in Table
1) previous research leads to the expectation that a
subject will retain all jobs having fewer violations than
his or her rejection threshold and will reject all jobs
having more violations than his or her rejection thresh-
old. (That is, the observed pattern of responses as one
proceeds down the list should contain no retentions
after the first rejection.) This will be called a consistent
rejection pattern. Because different subjects will have
different rejection thresholds there need not be a simi-
lar ‘break point’ in the pattern of retentions and rejec-
tions across subjects, but the consistent rejection pat-
tern must hold for individual subjects if we are to con-
clude that they are performing consistently.
All of subjects in the UC group completed the task,
of course. Of the 23 subjects in this group, 20 (87%)
exhibited consistent rejection patterns. The mean re-
jection threshold for the 20 who had consistent patterns
was 2.89 violations.
Of the 19 subjects in the TC group, 2 (10%) failed
to complete the task but it was unclear whether they
ignored the time constraint and plodded on with the
execution of the compatibility test or whether they sim-
ply failed to perform the task appropriately. Of the
remaining 17 subjects who completed the task in the
constrained time, only 7 (41%) exhibited consistent re-
jection patterns, which is significantly different from
the 87% for the UC group who exhibited consistent
rejection thresholds (Z Å 3.21, p õ .001), demonstra-
ting an effect of the time constraint. The mean rejection
threshold for the 7 who both completed the task and
had consistent patterns was 2.71, which is not signifi-
cantly different from the threshold of 2.89 for the UC
group.
Abbreviation. The rejection patterns of each of the
10 subjects in the TC group who completed the task
but had inconsistent rejection patterns were subjected
to individual analyses in an attempt to account for their
rejection pattern with an abbreviation of the compati-
bility test. The first abbreviation consisted of recomput-
ing Eq. (1) after deleting the feature the subject had
ranked as least important, then recomputing again de-
leting the least and next least important features, and
so on until only the most important feature remained.
The question was whether any abbreviated set of fea-
tures would account for the subject’s rejection pattern.
The second abbreviation consisted of using only the
first few features in a job’s description. Because the
seven features were listed in the same order for all
eight jobs, it was possible to examine this version of
abbreviation for each subject in the same way the ver-
sion described above was examined.
Neither version of the abbreviated compatibility test
accounted for the rejection patterns of any of the seven
subjects.

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226 BENSON AND BEACH
Speed. Recall that because the time constraint of 2
min, 4 s is one standard deviation below the mean time
taken by the pretest subjects to complete the task, it
is to be expected that roughly 84% of the subjects in
the TC group would fail to complete the task if they
did not speed up or abbreviate execution of the compati-
bility test. As we saw above, no subject abbreviated the
test. Only 3 of the 19 (16% versus the expected 84%,
Å 1.89, p Å .03) of subjects in the TC group failed to
complete the task, implying that relative to the pretest
subjects, most of the TC subjects in Experiment 1 were
able to speed up in order to complete the task within
the allotted time.
EXPERIMENT 2
The results of Experiment 1 show that time con-
straints interfere with screening, as revealed by the
significantly greater number of inconsistent rejection
patterns in the TC group. Moreover, the effect does not
lie in use of an abbreviated version of the test.
The 2/19 (10%) of the subjects in the TC group who
did not complete the task may have been unwilling or
unable to compensate for the time constraint by speed-
ing up execution of the compatibility test, but the data
do not settle the question of whether they could have
compensated by speeding up, it merely suggests that
they might not have done so. The question remains,
therefore, whether the subjects in the TC group, both
those who completed and those who did not, were op-
erating at their capacity or whether they could have
increased execution speed, and consistent execution of
the strategy, even more if they had a reason to do so.
Previous research (e.g., McAllister, Mitchell, &
Beach, 1979) has demonstrated that stressing the im-
portance of the decision can increase the level of perfor-
mance. Therefore, Experiment 2 consisted of rerunning
Experiment 1 with the addition of the following to the
initial instructions for both groups: ‘‘Because you are
low on money and have bills that are past due, it is
important for you to find a job very soon. Moreover,
whatever job you end up taking, you almost certainly
will have to stay with it for a while because you cannot
risk going without a paycheck while you move to an-
other job.’’ It was expected that stressing the impor-
tance of the task would, compared to the subjects in
Experiment 1, lead subjects in this experiment to in-
crease execution speed if they could, while maintaining
consistency.
There were 25 subjects in the UC group and 26 in
the TC group.
Results
Eighteen of the 25 subjects in the UC group (72%)
evidenced consistent rejection patterns, which is not
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TABLE 2
Percentage of Subjects with Consistent Rejection Patterns,
Mean Thresholds, and Percentage of Subjects Who Completed
the Task for Each of the Time Constraint Conditions in Exper-
iments 1 and 2
Experiment 1 Experiment 2
Time
Constraint: UC TC UC TC
% Consistent 87 41 72 65
Mean threshold 2.89 2.71 3.61 3.65
% Complete 100 84 100 100
significantly different from the 87% for the UC group
in experiment 1 (Table 2). The mean rejection threshold
for the 18 subjects who evidenced consistent rejection
patterns was 3.61, which is significantly different from
the mean rejection threshold of 2.89 for the UC group
in Experiment 1 (t Å 2.43, p Å .02). In short, when
there was no time constraint, stressing the importance
of the task did not influence the percentage of subjects
evidencing consistent rejection patterns but it signifi-
cantly increased the subjects’ willingness to overlook
flaws in the job options. That is, the instructions about
importance raised the rejection thresholds so that sub-
jects retained more jobs than they did when importance
was not stressed.
Seventeen of the 26 subjects in the TC group (65%)
evidenced consistent rejection patterns. This percent-
age of consistent patterns is significantly greater than
the 41% for the TC group in Experiment 1 (Z Å 1.60,
p Å .05). The mean rejection threshold for the 17 sub-
jects who evidenced consistent rejection patterns was
3.65, which is a significantly higher threshold than the
mean rejection threshold of 2.71 for the TC group in
Experiment 1 (t Å 2.21, p Å .04), but not significantly
different from the mean threshold of 3.61 for the UC
group in Experiment 2 (above). For none of the 9 sub-
jects who exhibited inconsistent patterns could the pat-
terns be accounted for by an abbreviated version of the
compatibility test.
All of the 26 TC subjects (100%) completed the task,
which is significantly greater than the 84% observed in
Experiment 1 (z Å 2.66, p Å .004) and significantly
greater than the 16% that would be expected if subjects
had not increased processing speed beyond that of the
pretest subjects (Z Å 9.71, p õ .001). This implies that
the instructions resulted in even the slowest subjects in-
creasing execution speed in order to complete the task.
In summary, in contrast to the TC group in Experi-
ment 1, stressing the importance of the task led to all
of the subjects completing the task, implying increased
speed of execution for even the slowest subjects. It also
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 TIME CONSTRAINTS
led to a significantly greater percentage of the subjects
evidencing consistent rejection patterns and to a sig-
nificant rise in rejection thresholds for those who evi-
denced consistent patterns such that they retained
more jobs than they did when task importance was not
stressed.
DISCUSSION
These experiments were designed to examine the ef-
fects of time constraints on screening, to complement
earlier studies of the effects of time constraints on
choice. Experiment 1 demonstrated that time con-
straints result in an increase in the number of subjects
exhibiting inconsistent rejection patterns, suggesting
less careful execution of the compatibility test, al-
though the exact reason is not clear. Even at that, more
than the expected number of subjects completed the
task, implying that they increased the speed of execu-
tion of the test. There was no evidence of subjects re-
sorting to abbreviated versions of the test in order to
finish the task within the prescribed time.
These results are only in part similar to the results
for choice. Time constraints lead some subjects to speed
up strategy execution in both screening and choice, but
there did not appear to be a counterpart in screening
to the finding that time constraints lead to switching
to simpler choice strategies. Instead, some subjects ap-
peared simply to be less consistent in executing the
compatibility test in screening, leading to inconsistent
rejection patterns and inconsistent rejection thresh-
olds.
Experiment 2 demonstrated that, in comparison to
the time constrained condition of Experiment 1, in-
structions that stressed the importance of the task re-
sulted in fewer inconsistent rejection patterns, perhaps
suggesting more careful execution of the compatibility
test, but in addition the rejection threshold was raised
so fewer jobs were rejected. The importance instruc-
tions also resulted in all of the subjects completing the
task, suggesting an increase in the speed of execution
by even the slowest subjects. Thus, importance
prompted subjects to operate more quickly but to be
more tolerant of incompatibility (raised rejection
threshold), thereby screening out fewer jobs and pass-
ing on the more exacting part of the decision to the
choice stage of the process.
We should note that the manner in which the time
constraint was selected for these experiments is all-
important in detecting increased speed of strategy exe-
cution. As noted by Svenson and Benson (1993a,
1993b), most researchers are rather cavalier about se-
lecting the prescribed interval to be used for the time
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227
constraint in their experiments. Indeed, in most re-
ports no rationale at all is given. In contrast, by timing
‘‘normal’’ execution time in a pretest and selecting an
interval that is precisely one standard deviation below
the mean of the distribution of observed times, we are
on much firmer ground. The use of one standard devia-
tion below the mean enables us to make a strong predic-
tion about what ought to happen if subjects can not or
do not increase their speed of execution; 84% of the
subjects in the time constrained group ought to fail to
complete the task. In fact, in Experiment 1 we found
that only 16% did not complete the task and in Experi-
ment 2, when importance was stressed, none of the
subjects failed to complete, implying that the instruc-
tions motivated them to speed up even more than in
Experiment 1. We concur with Svenson and Benson
(1993a, 1993b) that, when times are normally distrib-
uted, this statistical definition of time constraint ought
to become the standard way of defining time con-
straints in future research.
Perhaps the most puzzling result of this research is
the absence of evidence for use of abbreviated versions
of the compatibility test by the time constrained sub-
jects. Future research should be designed to more
closely examine this question. If for no other reason
than that common sense suggests there ought to be a
point at which motivation to complete the task is so
great, and the time allowed to do the task is so short,
that subjects must resort to using only the most im-
portant or the first information they receive about op-
tions in order to screen them. Presumably the present
experiments fell short of that point, but even at that it
is striking that subjects attempted to use all of the
information about each option they screened, even at
the price of inconsistent application of the compatibility
test or of failing to complete the task. Future studies
must examine task conditions that do or do not encour-
age subjects to compromise precision and completion
in order to preserve thoroughness.
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