The use of graphs as decision aids in relation to information overload and managerial decision quality

Nowadays, people with limited information processing capability are unable to cope with an exponentially increasing amount of information, leading to a phenomenon called information overload. This phenomenon has widely been recognized to have adverse effects on decision quality. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of using graphs as decision aids to reduce the adverse effects of information overload on decision quality. The results obtained from an experiment simulating a real business prediction task with a sample of business managers indicated that prediction accuracy deteriorated under information overload. However, the mode of presentation format alone did not have any significant impact on prediction accuracy; nor did the interactions of information load and the mode of presentation format. The implications of these results are discussed.