Extensiveness
Another useful management device is to
identify what sources of information an
individual accesses and draw a distinction
with the amount of information actually
used. In making this distinction, an
individual will often use a routine to avoid
problems of extensiveness. Extensiveness relates to a situation in which individuals
have available to them complete information but choose not to use it because it is unwieldy
to do so. This is not the same as optimising
subject to a search cost constraint since there
are many situations in which search cost/
benefit calculations do not provide sufficient guidance for behaviour and hence we are left with a situation in which we fall back to rule and habit related behaviour. Quite by far the
best example of this is searching for information on the Web.