The contribution: Case study and teaching note

Huntington University has depended on its tuition for most of its operations and thus was not prepared for the gift it was about to receive. After considerable discussion at the Board of Visitors meeting of Huntington's School of Management about the importance of ethics in the curriculum, one retiring corporate head, Dan Jordan, challenged the school to make a significant effort to assume responsibility for the ethical qualities of its graduates. Jordan offered the school its largest contribution ever—which he restricted to the area of ethics. The dean of the college of management, Peter McElroy, now faced an enviable problem: how to spend the income from this gift in a way that conformed to the wishes of the donor and best served the needs of his college.     

Qualitative decision making with integrated systems design methodology: A case study

System design is associated with building a formal morphology of the system, comprising the process of defining the system parameters, submodels, and criteria, selecting an optimal candidate, and preparing a detail implementation plan for the chosen candidate. It is primarily a wholistic approach to engineering a system, and is differentiated from operations research and other analytical methods. Specifically, operations research may be used to help resolve problems within a system, but usually does not replace the design and development process necessary to complete a system. However, it assists in the development process of the resulting configurations.This case study introduces a set of criterion function models and algorithms for the design of systems, along with mathematical foundations for building the models. Criteria for the system are determined and candidate system values are represented as probabilities in the [0, 1] range in order to achieve ordinal ranking of candidates on a cardinal scale. Both mutually exclusive and interactive design criteria could be represented by the developed models, which allow reflection of the nature of a wide variety of real-world systems. The developed models and algorithms are illustrated with a numerical example.     

Antecendents and effects of decision comprehensiveness: The role of decision quality and perceived uncertainty

On the basis of a sample of 184 top executives, we investigated the roles of decision quality and perceived uncertainty in the relationship between decision comprehensiveness and performance. Our results show that decision quality mediates a large proportion of the comprehensiveness–performance relationship and may thus provide a more proximate outcome measure of the effect of comprehensiveness. In addition, we found that perceived uncertainty directly affects the level of comprehensiveness in organizations rather than moderating its effect on performance as conceptualized by previous research. Based on the integration of behavioral and information processing theories we suggest that more process-oriented measures such as decision quality and perceived uncertainty may overcome conflicting empirical results in the field.     

Rural supply cooperative: Capital budgeting decision case: feasibility study of auxiliary enterprises for a rural supply cooperative

This capital budgeting case evaluates the feasibility of adding an auxiliary enterprise to a feed milling operation that an agricultural supply cooperative is considering purchasing. Both quantitative and qualitative objectives are taken into consideration regarding the cooperative’s financial position, community employment, and farm level feasibility.     

Project risk management using multiple criteria decision-making technique and decision tree analysis: a case study of Indian oil refinery

This study proposes an integrated analytical framework for effective management of project risks using combined multiple criteria decision-making technique and decision tree analysis. First, a conceptual risk management model was developed through thorough literature review. The model was then applied through action research on a petroleum oil refinery construction project in the Central part of India in order to demonstrate its effectiveness. Oil refinery construction projects are risky because of technical complexity, resource unavailability, involvement of many stakeholders and strict environmental requirements. Although project risk management has been researched extensively, practical and easily adoptable framework is missing. In the proposed framework, risks are identified using cause and effect diagram, analysed using the analytic hierarchy process and responses are developed using the risk map. Additionally, decision tree analysis allows modelling various options for risk response development and optimises selection of risk mitigating strategy. The proposed risk management framework could be easily adopted and applied in any project and integrated with other project management knowledge areas.     

Scholarship and decision cases: pedagogy and standards for publication

Case studies represent an important form of scholarly output for educators of agribusiness management. This article defines scholarship with respect to case writing.First, it explains how case studies are scholarship in the educational process. The pedagogical foundation of the case method is this method’s effectiveness in developing the critical thinking skills of students. This in turn enhances learning and advances scholarly understanding.Second, it examines criteria that are used to assess the quality of cases and their accompanying teaching notes when being considered for journal publication. The standards of the International Food and Agribusiness Management Review are used to illustrate these criteria. Only by reaching these standards of scholarship will teaching notes and cases be of the quality needed to ensure that their use in the case method will develop the scholarly capabilities expected of graduates in agribusiness management.     

Informed decision making: the new paradigm

Health care cannot survive in its present form. It is becoming unaffordable for a large share of the country's population. Its quality and effectiveness inexplicably vary between communities and across time. With all these problems, the process of health care can be understood. All that are needed are good, basic data; its access, management, and analysis; and then presentation of facts and observations. Together, these functions describe the translation of data into information--the field of medical informatics. Information about such management concerns as clinical efficiency (which largely is related to appropriateness and cost-effectiveness) and about the realities of day-to-day medical practice can be used to improve the value of health care. Informed decision making is based solely on confidence that, given the right information and understanding, we can all make the right decisions. The right decisions mean better patient acceptance and satisfaction, a sense of value enhancement by payers, and support of the Hippocratic tradition.     

Ethical decision making: A cross-cultural comparison

The purpose of this study is to compare the ethical decision making of respondents from two different cultures. Perceived organizational support for ethical decision making was also compared. The samples include residents of South Florida, United States of America and Jamaica, West Indies. Respondents were employed full time. Results indicate that for the majority of business dilemmas presented, no significant differences were found. Implications for these findings are discussed.     

Simple decision problems: A graphical solution

The decision problem in which a choice has to be made between two projects, either or both of which may have uncertain outcomes, is shown to reduce to an interpretation of a single graph. Two example problems are considered and their graphs constructed. The technique is finally extended to allow the comparison of any number of projects.     

On deterministic production planning: a tutorial note

Abstract

Short-term single-product production planning problems with linear, convex or concave production cost functions can be solved using simple and intuitive structural rules. These rules provide pedagogical insights into some methods used for longer term problems.     

Residual income valuation and management remuneration under uncertainty: a note

The so-called Residual Income Valuation theorem states that the value of a project or a firm can be determined either on the basis of cash flows between the firm and its owners or by using residual incomes, provided that cash flows and residual incomes are derived from a set of accounting data that fulfills certain regularity conditions. Residual income is defined as accounting earnings reduced by a capital charge on book equity capital. In this paper it is shown that this theorem also applies when residual incomes and in particular the discount factors are uncertain. Risk-aversion of principals and agents is taken into account on the basis of properly defined risk-adjusted discount rates. This approach is preferred as it facilitates practical application. Implications are drawn with regards to valuation but also to the design of management remuneration systems. It is shown that the capital charge rate used to determine the performance-related compensation component should be reduced below the risk-adjusted rate, if the fixed component falls below a certain threshold. Absent agency cost or other externalities, the reduction of the capital charge rate is required to avoid underinvestment.     

Inferring decision strategies from clickstreams in decision support systems: a new process-tracing approach using state machines

Webstores can easily gather large amounts of consumer data, including clicks on single elements of the user interface, navigation patterns, user profile data, and search texts. Such clickstream data are both interesting to merchandisers as well as to researchers in the field of decision-making behavior, because they describe consumer decision-behavior on websites. This paper introduces an approach that infers decision-behavior from clickstream data. The approach observes clicks on elements of a decision-support-system and triggers a set of state-machines for each click. Each state-machine represents a particular decision-strategy which a user can follow. The approach returns a set of decision strategies that best explain the observed click-behavior of a user. Results of two experiments show that the algorithm infers strategies accurately. In the first experiment, the approach correctly infers most of the pre-defined decision-strategies. The second study analyzes the behavior of thirty-eight respondents and finds that the inferred mix of decision-strategies fits well the behavior described in the literature to date. Results show that using decision-support-systems on a web site and observing the user’s click-behavior make it possible to infer a specific decision strategy. The proposed method is general enough to be easily applied to both research and real-world settings, along with other decision-support-systems and strategies.     

Diversity,Equity, and Inclusion: decision science research opportunities

As of July 2022, all Fortune 100 companies have made public announcements about their commitments to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). At the same time, more universities are offering DEI certificates or degree programs. Despite this recent social movement, DEI research in decision science remains nascent. DEI can be a politically sensitive topic, but its economic and social impact on organizations and employees deserves careful examination. This article intends to engender a discussion of various DEI research opportunities for decision science researchers to explore.     

Funds versus stocks: a note on constraint classification

Even if the industrial production process forms a common frame of reference, the integration of the economist's concepts of production with those of the industrial production engineer may well present a vexed problem. Yet a basic requirement to engineers and economists alike ought to be a proper understanding of the interplay between engineering and economics in the area of industrial production. One solution to this problem may be to consider the production process in the unifying sense of a constraint satisfaction problem. This approach, which is not without merit in the history of science, has its foundation in an interdisciplinary constraint classification, developed originally in analytical mechanics. To illustrate this approach, we demonstrate in this note how the two economic notions of a fund of services and a stock of goods, are recast into two distinct constraint formulations of fundamental importance in the mathematical modelling of industrial production processes.     

Heaping in anniversary reaction studies: a cautionary note

Several studies have reported evidence that death is often associated with significant ceremonial events like holidays and birthdays, a phenomenon variously called the "anniversary reaction," "holiday effect," "birthday blues," etc. This article, using data from the social security death index (SSDI), shows how evidence for this phenomenon can arise from an artifact in death records called "death heaping" in which certain dates, usually the 1st or the 15th, are systematically entered for missing data. In this study, each calendar birthday for the year 2003 in the SSDI was paired with either the 14th or 15th calendar day of death. For each pairing, there were more deaths for the 15th than the 14th. A second analysis compared the correspondence between dying on the same day of the month as one's birthday for the first 28 days of the month. A significantly greater number of birth-death combinations occurred for the 1st and 15th day of the month. These results suggest that studies of "anniversary reactions" should conduct preliminary evaluations to consider the possibility that statistically significant relationships do not arise from "death heaping."     

The state of decision support systems: A review

Many organisations are now realising that information technology can make a significant contribution to their operations. Recent developments in decision support software are such that the time may have come when information technology will contribute significantly to managerial decision-making. This paper considers these developments alongside the organisational issues involved in decision-making, and the current position of IT in many mature organisations. The conclusion is that the new range of decision support software, whilst opening up further areas for computerised decision support, is unlikely to compete successfully for corporate IT funds. Use of the new tools will be restricted to small, isolated applications.