Leveraging automatic strategy discovery to teach people how to select better projects

The decisions of individuals and organizations are often suboptimal because normative decision strategies are too demanding in the real world. Recent work suggests that some errors can be prevented by leveraging artificial intelligence to discover and teach prescriptive decision strategies that take people's constraints into account. So far, this line of research has been limited to simplified decision problems. This article is the first to extend this approach to a real-world decision problem, namely project selection. We develop a computational method (MGPS) that automatically discovers project selection strategies that are optimized for real people and develop an intelligent tutor that teaches the discovered strategies. We evaluated MGPS on a computational benchmark and tested the intelligent tutor in a training experiment with two control conditions. MGPS outperformed a state-of-the-art method and was more computationally efficient. Moreover, the intelligent tutor significantly improved people's decision strategies. Our results indicate that our method can improve human decision-making in naturalistic settings similar to real-world project selection, a first step towards applying strategy discovery to the real world.