Procedure dependence in resource allocations: How focusing on resource or target affects variety-seeking

Many resource allocation tasks involve the assignment of multiple units of a resource (e.g., money, time, labor) to multiple targets (e.g., stocks, expenditure categories, projects to be carried out). The decision-maker can either focus on the individual targets and decide how many resource units each target should receive (allocation-by-target), or focus on the individual resource units and decide which target each unit should be assigned to (allocation-by-unit). We suggest that the two allocation procedures might result in different outcomes. Specifically, we predict that the allocation-by-unit procedure leads to more variety-seeking than the allocation-by-target procedure. Nine experiments (N = 4,152) provided evidence consistent with this procedure dependence hypothesis. We further demonstrate that the effect occurs because the allocation-by-target procedure encourages people to consider the differences between targets whereas the allocation-by-unit procedure induces people to focus more on each undifferentiated unit. As a result, allocation-by-target, relative to allocation-by-unit, leads to a lower variety-seeking, which manifests as a more concentrated distribution of the resource units across the targets. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).