Modeling Bounded Rationality in Drug Shortage Pharmacists Using Attention-Guided Dynamic Decomposition

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 13 May 2026] Modeling Bounded Rationality in Drug Shortage Pharmacists Using Attention-Guided Dynamic Decomposition Yaniv Eliyahu Amiri, Noah Chicoine, Jacqueline Griffin, Stacy Marsella Hospital pharmacists make high-stakes decisions to mitigate drug shortages under uncertainty, time pressure, and patient risk. Interviews revealed that pharmacists focus attention on a small subset of drugs, limiting cognitive effort to the most urgent cases. Motivated by these findings, we formalize a bounded-rational, attention-guided decision framework that dynamically decomposes drugs into a subset for high-cost reasoning and a complementary subset for low-cost monitoring. We develop two agents: an Expert Agent that applies attention weights derived from pharmacist interviews, and a Learner Agent that adapts attention allocation over time through experience. Across simulated scenarios spanning short to long horizons, we show that attention-guided planning supports stable decision-making without complete state reasoning. These results suggest that a primary decision is not what action to take, but where to allocate cognitive effort, and that attention-guided, satisficing strategies can reduce problem complexity while maintaining stable performance. Comments: Accepted at CogSci 2026. 6 pages plus references, 1 figure, 2 tables Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC) Cite as: arXiv:2605.14111 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2605.14111v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.14111 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Yaniv Amiri [view email] [v1] Wed, 13 May 2026 20:53:28 UTC (463 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs cs.HC References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)