Download or read book Decision Making and Change in Human Affairs written by H. Jungermann and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 525 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is only just recently that people have the tools to judge how well they are doing when making decisions. These tools were conceptualized in the seventeenth century. Since then many people have worked to sharpen the concepts, and to explore how these can be applied further. The problems of decision-making and the theory developed correspondingly have drawn the interest of mathematicians, psychologists, statisticians, economists, philosophers, organizational experts, sociologists, not only for their general relevance, but also for a more intrinsic fascination. There are quite a few institutionalized activities to disseminate results and stimulate research in decision-making. For about a decade now a European organizational structure, centered mainly around the psy chological interest in decision-making. There have been conferences in Hamburg, Amsterdam, Uxbridge, Rome and Darmstadt. Conference papers have been partly published+. The organization has thus stabilized, and its re latively long history makes it interesting to see what kind of developments occurred, within the area of interest.

Download or read book Public Policy Making Reexamined written by Yehezkel Dror and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 1983-01-01 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Public Policymaking Reexamined is now recognized as a fundamental treatise for public policy studies. Although it caused much controversy when it was first published for its systematic approach to policy studies, the book is acknowledged as a modern classic of continuing importance for the teaching and research of public policy, planning and policy analysis, and public administration. The paperback includes a new introduction updating and supplementing many of the author's original ideas. Professor Dror combines the approaches of policy analysis, behavioral science, and systems analysis in his examination of the reality of public policymaking and his suggestions for its reform. Actual policymaking is carefully evaluated with the help of explicit criteria and standards based on an optimal model approach, resulting in detailed proposals for improvement. He applies a scientific orientation to the study of social facts and theory.

Download or read book Responsible Decision Making written by Laszlo Zsolnai and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-28 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What should I do?, How should I deal with this?, How should I behave?, How should I act? we ask ourselves daily. But, this is only the first part of the sentence, while the full sentence is What should I do ... to achieve such and such?, for example to complete an assigned task, to do well before my boss or a client, to be pleased with myself, to carry out my plans, to make money in the stock market, to pass an exam, to complete an application, etc. These and similar questions that people ask, consciously or not, openly or not, are decisions.What skills must we master, especially when there is a need to make not only elementary decisions, but also decisions that affect the existence, health, and even lives of people? First, Laszlo Zsolnai writes that we should acquire the skill of gaining knowledge. Only then will we stand a chance of reacting to things that are improbable today, but could become a fact tomorrow. Also essential is the skill of designing, i.e., preparing actions conceptually in order to make decisions before irreversible changes occur. Finally, it is essential to master the skill of multidimensional judgment within the space defined by effectiveness, efficiency, and ethics.This is Zsolnai's attempt to build a model of making ethical decisions both effectively and efficiently. Therefore, the model is much broader than purely an analytical framework would be. It must tell us how to act rather than limit us to reflection on actions already performed; it must combine decision and praxiological analysis of human conduct. The proposed model enlarges the scope of the debate and suggests new avenues of both rational and responsible decision making. This is an original statement of the crossover of policy and morality.

Download or read book Research on Judgment and Decision Making written by William M. Goldstein and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-06-13 with total page 772 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an overview of recent research on the psychology of judgment and decision making, the field that investigates the processes by which people draw conclusions, reach evaluations, and make choices. An introductory, historically oriented chapter provides a way of viewing the overall structure of the field, its recent trends, and its possible directions. Subsequent sections present significant recent papers by prominent researchers, organized to reveal the currents, connections, and controversies that animate the field. Current trends in the field are illustrated with papers from ongoing streams of research. The papers on "connections" explore memory, explanation and argument, affect, attitudes, and motivation. Finally, a section on "controversies" presents problem representation, domain knowledge, content specificity, rule-governed versus rule-described behavior, and proposals for radical departures and new beginnings in the field. Students and researchers in psychology who have an interest in cognitive processes will find this text to be rewarding reading.

Download or read book Decision Order and Time in Human Affairs written by G. L. S. Shackle and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-24 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This second edition examines how one makes a decision and the factors that influence that decision.

Download or read book Decision Order and Time in Human Affairs written by George Lennox Sharman Shackle and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1961 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Analysing and Aiding Decision Processes written by P. Humphreys and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2000-04-01 with total page 567 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contains an edited selection of papers presented at the Eighth Research Conference on Subjective Probability, Utility and Decision Making, held in Budapest. Together they span a wide range of new developments in studies of decision making, the practice of decision analysis and the development of decision-aiding technology.The volume is arranged in sections: Societal Decision Making; Organizational Decision Making; Aiding the Structuring of Small Scale Decision Problems, and Tracing Decision Processes.The emphasis is on decision processes and structures and their applications, rather than formal modelling in isolation, thus reflecting current developments in research and practice which follow from the understanding of the nature and operation of decision theoretical models gained during the 1970's.The fifth section, A Symposium on the Validity of Studies on Heuristics and Biases, is of a different nature. The papers take stock of the considerable volume of work investigation ``heuristics and biases'' in decision making over the past decade, and their implication for theory and practice.

Download or read book Judicial Decision Making Sentencing Policy and Numerical Guidance written by Austin Lovegrove and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book describes an original, empirical study of judicial decision making. The process of determining sentences is a difficult one for judges and often unnecessarily intuitive, subjective, and complex. The present study introduces a conceptual outline and empirical technique for increasing the precision of sentencing policy, thus offering an aid to judges who sentence in the light of this policy. The primary purpose of this model of judicial decision making is to provide a framework for scaling the seriousness of any single case in relation to the facts of that case and for relating this assessment to the appropriate quantum of sentence. The validity of the model is tested and cross-validated in an archival study. This innovative research serves as an important prototype for a system of numerical guidance to judges and sentencers.

Download or read book Psychological Decision Theory written by J. Kozielecki and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1982-03-31 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Expertise and Decision Support written by F. Bolger and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-08-19 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together a range of contributors from Europe and North America. All contributions were especially commissioned with a view to e- cidating a major multidisciplinary topic that is of concern to both academics and practitioners. The focus of the book is on expert judgment and its interaction with decision support systems. In the first part, the nature of expertise is discussed and characteristics of expert judges are described. Issues concemed with the eval- tion of judgment in the psychological laboratory are assessed and contrasted with studies of expert judgment in ecologically valid contexts. In addition, issues concerned with eliciting and validating expert knowledge are discussed. Dem- strations of good judgmental performance are linked to situational factors such as feedback cycles, and measurement of coherence and reliability in expert ju- ment is introduced as a baseline determinant of good judgmental performance. Issues concerned with the representation of elicited expert knowledge in kno- edge-based systems are evaluated and methods are described that have been shown to produce improvements in judgmental performance. Behavioral and mathematical ways of combining judgments from multiple experts are compared and contrasted. Finally, the issues developed in the preceding contributions are focused on current controversies in decision support. Expert judgment is utilized as a major input into decision analysis, forecasting with statistical models, and expert s- tems.

Download or read book Risk Taking and Decision Making written by and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1998-02 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Risks are an integral part of complex, high-stakes decisions, and decisionmakers are faced with the unavoidable tasks of assessing risks and forming risk preferences. This is true for all decision domains, including financial, environmental, and foreign policy domains, among others. How well decisionmakers deal with risk affects, to a considerable extent, the quality of their decisions. This book provides the most comprehensive analysis available of the elements that influence risk judgments and preferences. The book has two dimensions: theoretical and comparative-historical. The study of risk-taking behavior has been dominated by the rational choice approach. Instead, the author adopts a socio-cognitive approach involving: a multivariate theory integrating contextual, cognitive, motivational, and personality factors that affect an individual decisionmaker's judgment and preferences; the social interaction and structural effects of the decisionmaking group and its organizational setting; and the role of cultural-societal values and norms that sanction or discourage risk taking behavior. The book's theoretical approach is applied and tested in five historical case studies of foreign military interventions. The richly detailed empirical data on the case studies make them, metaphorically speaking, an ideal laboratory for applying a process-tracing approach in studying judgment and decision processes at varying risk levels. The case studies analyzed are: U.S. interventions in Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989 (both low risk); Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968 (moderate risk): U.S. intervention in Vietnam in 1964-68 (high risk); and Israel's intervention in Lebanon in 1982-83 (high risk).

Download or read book Human Decision Making written by Lennart Sjöberg and published by Doxa Books. This book was released on 1983 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Judgment Misguided written by Jonathan Baron and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1998 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: People often follow intuitive principles of decision making, ranging from group loyalty to the belief that nature is benign. But instead of using these principles as rules of thumb, we often treat them as absolutes and ignore the consequences of following them blindly. In Judgment Misguided, Jonathan Baron explores our well-meant and deeply felt personal intuitions about what is right and wrong, and how they affect the public domain. Baron argues that when these intuitions are valued in their own right, rather than as a means to another end, they often prevent us from achieving the results we want. Focusing on cases where our intuitive principles take over public decision making, the book examines some of our most common intuitions and the ways they can be misused. According to Baron, we can avoid these problems by paying more attention to the effects of our decisions. Written in a accessible style, the book is filled with compelling case studies, such as abortion, nuclear power, immigration, and the decline of the Atlantic fishery, among others, which illustrate a range of intuitions and how they impede the public's best interests. Judgment Misguided will be important reading for those involved in public decision making, and researchers and students in psychology and the social sciences, as well as everyone looking for insight into the decisions that affect us all.

Download or read book Decision Making and Change in Human Affairs written by Gerard de Zeeuw and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Practical Reasoning in Human Affairs written by J. L. Golden and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology of original essays has been nearly .two and one-half years in the making, and reflects the generous effort of many persons. To begin with, we thank the contributors to the volume, who not only cooperated with regards to their own works, but who also provided valuable advice concerning the over-all volume. One of the contributors was outstanding in his assistance and warrants special mention: we thank Professor Michel Meyer, for his encouragement, counsel, and dedication to see this project to comple tion. We would also like to thank Professor Jaakko Hintikka for his encouragement and Mrs. Kuipers of Reidel for her patience and under standing along the way. A project such as this could never have been completed without the unique assistance of members of the Department of Communication, Ohio State University: Ms. Kimberly Pasi and Mr. Charles Mawhirtcr. Also, special thanks are due to our graduate research assistant Ms. Susan Jasko, for her proofreading and bibliographic work. The pressures of developing a Festschrift are considerable and could not have been met without the cooperation and enthusiasm of Mrs. Perelman, especially in allowing us to publish Professor Perelman's address to Ohio State University as our introduction.

Download or read book Chaos Catastrophe and Human Affairs written by Stephen J. Guastello and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2013-05-13 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether talking about steering a wheelbarrow over rugged terrain or plotting the course of international relations, human performance systems involve change. Sometimes changes are subtle or evolutionary, sometimes they are catastrophic or revolutionary, and sometimes the changes are from periods of relative calm to periods of vibrant oscillations to periods of chaos. As a general rule, more complex systems are likely to produce more complex forms of change. Although social scientists have long acknowledged that change occurs and have considered ways to effect desirable change, the dynamical processes of change have been poorly understood in the past. This volume combines recent advances in mathematics and experimental design with the best available social science theories to produce a new, integrated, and compact theory of work, organizations, and social evolution. The domains of application extend from human decision-making processes to personnel selection and work motivation, work performance under conditions of stress, accident and health risk analysis, the development of social institutions and economic systems, creativity and innovation, organizational development and group dynamics, and political revolutions and war. Relative to other literature on nonlinear dynamical systems theory (NDS), this book is unique in that it integrates new developments in NDS with substantive psychological theory. It builds on many recent developments in organizational theory to show that nonlinear dynamics were often implicit in those works all along. The result is an entirely new way of viewing social events, understanding change processes, and asking questions about social systems. This book also contains much new empirical work and explains the newly developed methods for testing these new hypotheses.

Download or read book Comparative Decision Making written by Philip H. Crowley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-30 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decision making cuts across most areas of intellectual enquiry and academic endeavor. The classical view of individual human thinkers choosing among options remains important and instructive, but the contributors to this volume broaden this perspective to characterize the decision making behavior of groups, non-human organisms and even non-living objects and mathematical constructs. A diverse array of methods is brought to bear-mathematical, computational, subjective, neurobiological, evolutionary, and cultural. We can often identify best or optimal decisions and decision making processes, but observed responses may deviate markedly from these, to a large extent because the environment in which decisions must be made is constantly changing. Moreover, decision making can be highly constrained by institutions, natural and social context, and capabilities. Studies of the mechanisms underlying decisions by humans and other organisms are just beginning to gain traction and shape our thinking. Though decision making has fundamental similarities across the diverse array of entities considered to be making them, there are large differences of degree (if not kind) that relate to the question of human uniqueness. From this survey of views and approaches, we converge on a tentative agenda for accelerating development of a new field that includes advancing the dialog between the sciences and the humanities, developing a defensible classification scheme for decision making and decision makers, addressing the role of morality and justice, and moving advances into applications-the rapidly developing field of decision support.