Competitive judgments in a business simulation: A comparison between American and Chinese business students

Abstract

A complex total business enterprise computer simulation was used as the setting for a study of judgments by Chinese and American business school students. The subjects were asked to make a series of decisions and give judgments about expected levels of competition for a new market opportunity in the simulation world. Decisions were compared across the groups based on the decision structure and content. The results confirm previous research as the American participants generated significantly more responses overall, and especially judgment-consistent responses than the Chinese participants. Analysis of the content of the decision representations found that the relative proportion of singular to distributional information in the responses was similar for both American and Chinese individuals when making decisions about their own teams, but the Chinese participants focused more heavily on distributional information when making judgments about the behavior of others. This implies that American and Chinese individuals focus on different aspects of similar information and this may influence subsequent judgments. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.