Seven Characteristics of a Good Decision (original) (raw)

Decision-making: Identifying Critical Points and Picking the System That\u27s Right for You

1999

David Struthers is part of a family farm operation that involves his brother, sister, and their parents. They have a 900-sow farrow to finish system with some confinement buildings, but they are converting to a hoop building system. They chose hoop buildings because of the lower cost of construction and decreased environmental impact, and the fact that the hoops work well for them. Homer Showman started using the hoop system six years ago with three structures. He now has eight hoop buildings. He operates one confinement building as a nursery I grower facility. He chose hoop buildings for their low costilow capital outlay and lower environmental impact 36 on the community (less odor). Richard Thompson and his son, Rex, have experienced many changes through the years. When Richard began farming in 1958, he said he caught the enough is never enough disease. He was always buying feeder pigs and cattle, putting in more pens, and cropping with continuous corn. All systems had high inputs...

Decision-making: Identifying Critical Points and Picking the System That's Right for You

1999

is part of a family farm operation that involves his brother, sister, and their parents. They have a 900-sow farrow to finish system with some confinement buildings, but they are converting to a hoop building system. They chose hoop buildings because of the lower cost of construction and decreased environmental impact, and the fact that the hoops work well for them.

Decision making

psychol.ucl.ac.uk

This chapter reviews normative and descriptive aspects of decision making. Expected Utility Theory (EUT), the dominant normative theory of decision making, is often thought to provide a relatively poor description of how people actually make decisions.

The Main Factors beyond Decision Making

This paper argues that the time has come to focus attention on the search for factors that affect decision making because decision making errors are costly and are growing more costly, decision makers are receptive, and academic insights are sure to follow from research on improvement. In addition to calling for research on improvement strategies, this paper aims to conclude the main factors that affect decision making, and how these factors have a great impact and influence on decision makers. The researcher focuses on literature review to come up with these main factors.

A decision maker's options

Philosophical Studies, 1983

One of the goals of rational decision making is to adopt an option whose expected utility is at least as great as the expected utilities of other options. In explications of this goal, a decision maker's options are usually taken as the future actions that he can perform, x This seems odd since a decision maker's immediate alternatives at the time of decision are the decisions that he can make at the time. Here I will argue that in the goal to maximize expected utility, options should be taken as possible decisions rather than as possible actions, that is, as possible decisions to perform actions rather than as possible actions that might be decided upon. 2 Some people who prefer taking options as possible actions may imagine that taking options as possible decisions quickly leads to reductio. They may think that making a decision is deciding upon an option. Hence, if options are possible decisions, every decision is a decision to make some possible decision. Accordingly, executing a decision results in another decision, which, if executed, results in another decision, ad infinitum.

On the Assessment of Decision Quality: Considerations Regarding Utility, Conflict and Accountability

During the course of their lives, people are faced with many decisions-covering a wide variety of contexts and ranging in importance. Common decision-making topics include career moves, whether to get married (and, if so, to whom and when), what house to rent (or buy), where to shop for groceries and what to have for dinner. The need for making a good decision grows as the importance of the context increases. Unfortunately, it is often not obvious what constitutes a good decision.

JOEP2005-decision-making

The ''framing effect'' is observed when the description of options in terms of gains (positive frame) rather than losses (negative frame) elicits systematically different choices. Few theories explain the framing effect by using cognitive information-processing principles. In this paper we present an explanatory theory based on the cost-benefit tradeoffs described in contingent behavior. This theory proposes that individuals examining various alternatives try to determine how to make a good decision while expending minimal cognitive effort. For this study, we used brain activation functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to evaluate individuals that we asked to choose between one certain alternative and one risky alternative in response to problems framed as gains or losses. Our results indicate that the cognitive effort required to select a sure gain was considerably lower than the cognitive effort required to choose a risky gain. Conversely, the cognitive effort expended in choosing a sure loss was equal to the cognitive effort expended in choosing a risky loss. fMRI revealed that the cognitive functions used by the decision makers in this study were localized in the prefrontal and parietal cortices of the brain, a finding that suggests the involvement of working memory and imagery in the selection process.