Real-Life Decision-Making

✍ Scribed by Mats Danielson, Love Ekenberg

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2023
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 141
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Have you ever experienced a decision situation that was hard to come to grips with? Did you ever feel a need to improve your decision-making skills? Is this something where you feel that you have not learned enough practical and useful methods? In that case, you are not alone! Even though decision-making is both considered and actually is a very important skill in modern work-life as well as in private life, these skills are not to any reasonable extent taught in schools at any level. No wonder many people do indeed feel the need to improve but have a hard time finding out how. This book is an attempt to remedy this shortcoming of our educational systems and possibly also of our common, partly intuition-based, decision culture. Intuition is not at all bad, quite the contrary, but it has to co-exist with rationality. We will show you how.

Methods for decision-making should be of prime concern to any individual or organisation, even if the decision processes are not always explicitly or even consciously formulated. All kinds of organisations, as well as individuals, must continuously make decisions of the most varied nature in order to prosper and attain their objectives. A large part of the time spent in any organisation, not least at management levels, is spent gathering, processing, and compiling information for the purpose of making decisions supported by that information. The same interest has hitherto not been shown for individual decision-making, even though large gains would also be obtained at a personal level if important personal decisions were better deliberated. This book aims at changing that and thus attends to both categories of decision-makers.

This book will take you through a journey starting with some history of decision-making and analysis and then go through easy-to-learn ways of structuring decision information and methods for analysing the decision situations, beginning with simple decision situations and then moving on to progressively harder ones, but never losing sight of the overarching goal that the reader should be able to follow the progression and being able to carry out similar decision analyses in real-life situations.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Preface
About the Authors
Chapter 1: Introduction
1.1. A Brief History of Decision Theory
1.2. The Origin of Decision Analysis
Chapter 2: Decision Modelling
2.1. Decisions under Certainty
2.2. Decisions under Strict Uncertainty
Chapter 3: Bayesian Decision Analysis
Chapter 4: Impmprecise Information
4.1. Imprecise Probability
4.2. A Decision Process
4.3. A Decision Example
Chapter 5: Multi-Criteria Decision-Making
5.1. Proportional Scoring
5.2. Ratio Scoring
5.3. Ranking
5.4. Other Approaches
5.5. Rank Three
Chapter 6: The Pilot Method
6.1. Stage 1 – P-C Lists
6.2. Finishing after Stage 1
6.3. Stage 2 – An Argument Matrix
6.4. Finishing after Stage 2
6.5. Stage 3 – Ranking the Alternatives
6.6. Finishing after Stage 3
6.7. Stage 4 – Ranking the Criteria
6.8. Finishing after Stage 4
6.9. Stage 5 – Separate Cost Analysis
6.10. Summary
Chapter 7: Real-Life Case Studies
7.1. Procurement
7.2. Policy Formation for Catastrophic Events
7.3. Energy Planning
Chapter 8: Guidelines for Real-Life Decisions
8.1. Single-Criterion Decisions
8.2. Multi-Criteria Decisions
Appendix: The DecideIT Software
A.1. Step 1 – Identify and Name the Criteriaand the Alternatives
A.2. Step 2 – Enter Information about the Strategies (Alternatives)
A.3. Step 3 – Determine the Importanceof the Criteria
A.4. Step 4 – Evaluation
A.5. Installation
A.6. Licence Key Entry
Reading Tipips
References
Index