Does culture matter? : Importance assessment and judgment by Swedish and Dutch laymen in non-routine organizational decision-making

research on importance assessment. Importance assessment and judgment are part of the decision-making process. Importance assessment is the cognitive process ofa subject thinking about what isimportant to him. W hen the importance of an attribute isassessed it can be judged, for example in comparison to another attribute (relative importance). T he focus of this research is on the rationality with which the subjects engage in these cognitive activities. I compared Dutch and S w edish subjects to each other to study whether culture influences rationality in importance assessment and judgment. T he datafor this descriptive and explorative study were collected through think-aloud experiments with 18 Dutch and 10 S w edish subjects. T he 18 Dutch experiments were conducted by Heerkens for his research. T he ten S w edish experiments w ere held in U meå, N orth-S w eden. Both groups ofsubjects were businessstudentsand were considered to be laymen regarding the decision they had to make. T he decision that had to be made concerned an acquisition ofcapital goodsin an organization context.