Will You Accept the AI Recommendation? Predicting Human Behavior in AI-Assisted Decision Making

Internet users make numerous decisions online on a daily basis. With the rapid advances in AI recently, AI-assisted decision making—in which an AI model provides decision recommendations and confidence, while the humans make the final decisions—has emerged as a new paradigm of human-AI collaboration. In this paper, we aim at obtaining a quantitative understanding of whether and when would human decision makers adopt the AI model’s recommendations. We define a space of human behavior models by decomposing the human decision maker’s cognitive process in each decision-making task into two components: the utility component (i.e., evaluate the utility of different actions) and the selection component (i.e., select an action to take), and we perform a systematic search in the model space to identify the model that fits real-world human behavior data the best. Our results highlight that in AI-assisted decision making, human decision makers’ utility evaluation and action selection are influenced by their own judgement and confidence on the decision-making task. Further, human decision makers exhibit a tendency to distort the decision confidence in utility evaluations. Finally, we also analyze the differences in humans’ adoption behavior of AI recommendations as the stakes of the decisions vary.