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This paper expands research on the judge advisor system (JAS) by examining advice utilization and trust. Experiment 1 examined five factors that could increase utilization of expert advice: judge's trust in the advisor, advisor confidence, advisor accuracy, judge's prior relationship with the advisor, and judge's power to set payment to the advisor. While judge's trust and advisor confidence correlated with the judge matching the advisor's advice, a stepwise regression found that of the five variables, advisor confidence was the only significant predictor of the judge matching the advisor. Experiment 2 examined trust without the role assignment to judge or advisor. While trust expressed in partner was not higher for the judge than the advisor in Experiment 1, in Experiment 2 trust in partner expressed by the low-expertise dyad member was higher than trust expressed by the high-expertise dyad member. Results from the two experiments are discussed in the context of Sniezek and Van Swol (2001).
People often solicit advice from others when making decisions, especially from advisors who have more expertise about the decision domain than the decision-maker. The judge advisor system (JAS; Savadori, Van Swol, & Sniezek, 2001; Sniezek & Buckley, 1995; Sniezek & Van Swol, 2001) addresses this form of decision making. The JAS offers a methodological tool to study complex groups and dyads with role differentiation. With the JAS, the judge has implicit or explicit power to make the final decision, but he or she receives advice from one or more advisors. Although this type of social decision making is ubiquitous in people's lives, research has often spent more time examining either group decision making, in which the final decision is made by the group as a whole, or individual decision making (Sniezek & Buckley, 1995). However, the interactive decision making studied within the JAS is very common in organizations (Heath & Gonzalez, 1995; Vroom, Jago, Eden, Yetton, & Craig, 1998; Vroom & Yetton, 1976).
An advisor's expertise should be an important factor in a judge's decision to use an advisor's advice. Indeed, research has found that judges are more likely to accept advice from expert advisors than novice advisors (Harvey & Fischer, 1997; Yaniv & Kleinberger, 2000). Although, Harvey and Fischer found that decision makers were reluctant to reject help...