Prof. Tibor Besedes presented his research on decision making in a seminar at the Virginia  Commonwealth University on October 21. In his paper "Reducing Choice Overload without without Reducing Choices" Besedes and his coauthors examine whether presenting large choice sets, such as a choice of a health care plan, through a series of smaller choice sets improves the quality of decisions individuals make. They find that such reductions help, but the nature of the reduction in the size of the choice set matters. In addition, individuals tend to prefer the least the approach which results in best decisions, which is a tournament-like structure where all options are examined in a series of smaller choice sets, with the final choice set consisting of options chosen in the previous round.