Intelligence gathering for decision making

Empirical studies of decision making seldom consider the intelligence gathering activities required for decision making. In an attempt to fill this void, this study set out to identify and assess some of the key steps in gathering intelligence, considering the difficulty of the decision and available resources. The study found performance gapping and premising to be crucial activities and explored how each is carried out. A variety of premising and gapping tactics were uncovered, with some having better success than others. These tactics were found to influence the search approach selected to uncover alternatives and the success of the resulting decision. The best results were noted when search efforts are guided by needs documented with a quantitative performance gap; and when formal search or negotiation is used to identify alternatives. These findings hold for decisions that have high and low difficulty and for those with high and low resource support. The implications of these findings for decision makers and decision making are discussed.     

The Influences of User Characteristics on Performance in a Logistics DSS Application

Decision Support Systems (DSS) are widely used in logistics decision applications, and a large number and variety of systems are commercially available. We investigate the contributions of user characteristics including experiences, data preferences, intuition, and effort to decision performance in a logistics DSS context. The study includes a laboratory experiment in which decision makers with varied experiences used a DSS to make facility network design decisions for problems of varying complexity. Two variants of the DSS are utilized in order to examine the interactions of a DSS decision aid with user characteristics. We find that intuition and effort are associated with decision-making performance. High analytic ability is not related to intuition, however. Education and previous experience are associated with performance. Yet these characteristics are also unrelated to intuition. Decision makers who highly value disaggregated data provided by the DSS tend to perform poorly. Also, the results suggest that the effects of users' experiences and preferences on performance are influenced by an analytical decision aid.     

A Staged Service Innovation Model*

Drawing from the new product development (NPD) literature, service quality literature (SERVQUAL), and empirically grounded research with 53 service innovation decision makers, we develop a staged service innovation model (SIM) for decision makers. We tested the model using empirical data from 329 firms across five industries. The empirical results show that integrating prelaunch service quality training into new service development process leads to successful service innovation. The model developed in this article can be used as a decision support tool and diagnostic model for assessing service innovation ideas, evaluating performance of ongoing service innovations, allocating resources, and improving success rate of service innovations. Decision makers can use the measures developed in this study as a checklist to identify their strengths in delivering service quality to their own customers as well as areas of improvement. This article extends service innovation research by combining NPD and service quality development into a single study and opens the door to further work that could help improve the success rate of service innovations. The model can serve as a base model for future research extensions in service innovation research. A major takeaway for the academic reader is that the SIM demonstrates the value of using the SERVQUAL literature to understand how best to provide excellent quality that results in more fully satisfied customers and, ultimately, improved service performance.     

Drivers of internationalization success: a conjoint choice experiment on German SME managers

Internationalization is a common growth strategy for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). However, SMEs face several challenges within the internationalization process. As SMEs are characterized by limited resources, managers are constantly involved in a decision-making process concerning the allocation of the SMEs’ resources. Therefore, internationalization can be understood as a complex, multidimensional decision process. Based on a set of 2244 internationalization decisions made by German SME managers, the present study examines how eight strategic and structural factors drive the perceived international success of SMEs. When applying conjoint choice analysis, the results suggest that especially equity financing in the internationalization process, an appropriate market selection as well as proactive motives, and a long-term scope can drive SMEs’ international success. Moreover, it becomes evident that strategic factors are more relevant for successful internationalization than structural factors.     

On the effectiveness of cognitive feedback from an interface agent

The objective of this study was to determine the impact of task information (TI) provided by an interface agent during the idea evaluation and integration step of the problem formulation stage of the problem solving process. The effectiveness assessment was based on solving diagnostic decision problems in the domain of complex industrial machinery. Ten domain experts participated in this study. Decision support was provided by a case-based reasoning system. Findings suggest that TI provided by the interface agent had no effect on the decision maker's performance, nor on the associated cognitive effort. However, a verbal protocol analysis revealed that the ten subjects used the interface agent to verify their decision processes. The results and their implications are discussed with respect to current findings in the area of decision support systems.     

Decision Style in British and Swedish Organizations: A Comparative Examination of Strategic Decision Making

In this paper results from parallel large scale studies of strategic decision making in Sweden and the United Kingdom are reported. Swedish decision makers are found to employ a decision making style which emphasizes negotiation within a restricted group. This style, which involves considerable information search, leads to very long decision times. Strategic decisions in Britain are made among groups which include fewer strongly committed participants. Delays are common and often serious, but do not lengthen the process unduly. Decision styles in both countries include contrasting tendencies which produce a dynamic tension in the decision arena.     

“I feel and think,therefore I am”: An Affect-Cognitive Theory of management decisions

I propose an Affect-Cognitive Theory to comprehensively understand how decisions occur in organizations. To this aim, I first review the assumptions of sensemaking and decision-making streams of research, especially the influence of bounded rationality, affective states and their relationships with cognition; then, I integrate them on the common basis of socially situated cognition. This new theory emphasizes the role of affective states in determining/being determined by cognition and its errors, pointing out decision makers’ affect as the result of multi-level adaptations to the physical and social environment. Management decisions are path dependent but not immutable; they, indeed, bank on the predominant feeling resulting from the modifying interactions and regulations of decision makers with their physical and social environment. Here, decision makers are proposed as “emotional cognizers” overcoming the thinking-feeling dichotomy that has often featured in the study of management decisions. This theory is beneficial for behavioral strategy, offering the needed assumptions to intertwine human cognition, emotions, and social behavior.     

Development of simulation-based production execution system in a shipyard: a case study for a panel block assembly shop

The management of a panel block shop in a shipyard is a complex process that entails the largest amount of work and in which many decisions are involved. Shipbuilders have considered the process as a bottleneck since every panel for every ship must be processed through the shop. The objective of this research is to carry out a materials flow analysis to maximise process productivity and to place simulation optimisation technology in the hands of decision makers, such as production planners and supervisors. In this article, a production execution planning system is proposed for panel block operations utilising discrete-event simulation and simulated annealing. The simulation model was validated using a real production scenario and the comparison showed a very favourable agreement between the actual panel shop and the simulation model. The proposed system supports production planners by general dispatching rules and optimisation to make better scheduling decisions on the shop floor. The system will provide a complete schedule that is at least as clear and accurate as any schedule currently obtained.     

Decision process in one-of-a-kind production

One-of-a-kind production is project business. In any project, the decision process is of importance for a successful outcome. However, there is a need for a more formal approach to decision-making in projects. We have therefore, developed a model of the decision process. It uses three types of decisions: selection, authorisation and plan decisions. Enterprise models together with the project life cycle form a platform for developing a decision model. The life cycle enables a decision chain, whereas the enterprise models allow decisions at different levels. The horizontal decision chain is linked to physical flow of documents and materials. Vertically, decision-making is hierarchically decomposed into levels of different planning horizons and time periods.     

JUDGMENT POLICIES USED IN ASSESSING ENTERPRISE-ZONE ECONOMIC SUCCESS CRITERIA*

This paper reports on a study of the issue relationships and priorities used by public officials in making local economic-development policy decisions. Economic success criteria for evaluating distressed areas were compared and were found to vary in importance among officials. Policy bases of expert judges were determined. Their differences, as well as the implications of including this type of knowledge in the decision-making process, are discussed. Recommendations for a more detailed understanding of the public-policy decision process in economic development, through the use of a policy-capture approach, are made.     

Stakeholder Actions and Their Impact on the Organizational Cultures of Two Tobacco Companies

We link the behaviors of executives and lawyers in two tobacco companies, in defending their tobacco products to the actions of stakeholders (e.g., the U.S. Government and Congress, medical researchers, consumers, public‐health organizations, tobacco‐control advocates, and insiders who have spoken out). Included in our analysis, which is based on publicly available documents spanning over a period of almost six decades, are critical incidents in which moral disengagement tactics were applied in the decision‐making process. We infer that the disengagement tactics applied by tobacco decision makers are indicative of what Schein and other organizational scientists describe as organizational culture. We equate the critical incidents to the espoused beliefs and values and underlying assumptions which comprise organizational culture and explain that the cultures of these two tobacco companies are not consistent with the stakeholder theory of management. We conclude that the critical incidents we analyze were immoral and the representatives were indeed accountable for these behaviors. From an organizational change perspective, we discuss how analyzing these critical incidents can serve to assess the extent to which an organizational culture is ethical. Furthermore, these critical incidents can be fed back to organizational decision makers and can then be used to initiate organizational changes.     

Strategic planning in an age of uncertainty

Strategic planning and decision making in the face of uncertainty have always presented a serious challenge to top management, but the present scale of uncertainty is unprecedented. Decision makers used to be able to rely on the past to predict the trends of the future. Now they are increasingly being forced to make important decisions that depend upon highly uncertain external factors for which the past offers little guidance. In all areas of business and government, there is a vital need to understand and implement procedures that enable decision makers to deal more effectively with uncertainty for planning and allocating their organizations' resources.Because of differences in their social, political and economic environments, European and Japanese managers are today affected by many acute areas of uncertainty— such as industrial democracy, floating exchange rates, changing social and political values, growing environmental awareness, government regulation, technological change, pollution control regulation, energy cost, and raw material availability—earlier than their counterparts in the U.S.A. These uncertainties affect not only private sector manufacturing industries, but also financial and service industries as well as nationalized industries and government organizations.This article shows how ineffective methods of dealing with uncertainty can lead to serious mistakes with costly consequences. The cost of overconfidence and people's natural but futile tendency to ignore or to try to eliminate uncertainty is illustrated by the crises seen recently in the world steel and shipbuilding industries. The article then demonstrates how decision analysis procedures that focus directly on the major decision points in the strategic plan enable executives not only to include uncertainty directly in their strategic planning, but also to increase their understanding of the decision process and their ability to communicate the results to others.     

Complexity Factors and Intuition-based Methods for Facility Network Design

Logistics managers frequently utilize decision support systems (DSS) to make facility network design decisions. Many DSS do not provide optimization capabilities, but instead rely on scenario evaluation as a means for developing solutions. We experimentally assessed the performances of decision makers, including experienced managers, who used four variants of a scenario evaluation-based DSS to solve realistically sized network design problems of varying complexities. Complexity factors included DSS attributes, problem size, network types, and demand dispersion patterns. Decision makers' performances were assessed relative to optimal solutions. Overall, the decision makers generated relatively high-quality solutions using the DSS variants. The type of design problem solved did not significantly impact problem-solving performance. However, performance degraded and variability in solution quality escalated as problem size was increased. The availability of incremental solution cost improvement cues in the DSS significantly improved solution quality and reduced performance variability. Iconic graphic enhancements to the DSS did not consistently affect performance. However, significant interactions existed among the effects of DSS graphics capabilities, DSS information cues, and problem attributes.     

多属性决策决问题的满意度与赋权研究

多属性决策问题的决策中,决策者往往对属性上的数值存在一定的心理预期。首先,通过心理预期与实际数据获得决策对象在每个属性上的满意度,对决策对象进行筛选过滤;其次,提出属性值信息相容关系,利用属性值之间的相容度进行赋权,信息融合对满足决策者心理预期的决策对象排序择优;再次,提出决策对象满意度,并指出传统的排序方法获取的最优决策对象与决策者总体满意度最大的决策对象并不等价。具体算例表明,该方法科学有效且可行。     

Hypotheses for an Interpretative Model of Organizational Decision-making at Strategic Level

Abstract. Many problems that decision makers have to solve concern strategic environments. In such situations, the structural uncertainty they must face is overcome by using their representations of reality: people take decisions on the basis of their cognitive maps. In collective high level decision-making, conflicts can rise among different frames and definitions of the problem. The process through which the actors can reach a joint solution has a bargaining nature. The decision-makers' cognitive maps contain, besides the personal view of the problem to be solved, the perception of the position and bargaining power of the other actors. Strategic moves (commitments, threats…) can modify the partners' perceptions of the possibilities of success of their policy. As such, the decision-makers' cognitive maps finally become “complementary”, permitting an agreement.     

A process for hierarchical decision making with multiple objectives

This research was motivated by a recurring management problem of a large service organization in Philadelphia. The problem concerns the contraction of service facilities. Typically, management decisions of this type and magnitude affect the entire management hierarchy. Each manager in the hierarchy may have several objectives with respect to the problem. The perspective of each manager can contribute to the decision-making process by providing additional insight into both (a) what should be done and (b) the resistance to implementation which may result. Thus the output of this research is not a solution to a particular problem but rather a process for providing critical information for decisions of this type. This paper generalizes the information gathering process and presents the results of eliciting objectives from managers, formalizing objectives into measurable attributes, and interacting with the decision makers to use their implicit preference relationships over the set of Pareto-optimal alternatives. Intuitively, the procedure is appealing as it is flexible enough to allow formal input from all pertinent decision makers in the organization, it is hierarchically consistent, it is politically acceptable, and it is not cumbersome to apply.     

Judgmental Forecasting: Cognitive Reflection and Decision Speed

This research analyzes how individual differences affect performance in judgmental time‐series forecasting. Decision makers with the ability to balance intuitive judgment with cognitive deliberation, as measured by the cognitive reflection test, tend to have lower forecast errors. This relationship holds when controlling for intelligence. Furthermore, forecast errors increase for very fast or very slow decisions. We provide evidence that forecast performance can be improved by manipulating decision speed.     

Review of Empirical Studies in Multiobjective Mathematical Programming: Subject Reflection of Nonlinear Utility and Learning

Multiple objective programming provides a means of aiding decision makers facing complex decisions where trade-offs among conflicting objectives must be reconciled. Interactive multiobjective programming provides a means for decision makers to learn what these trade-offs involve, while the mathematical program generates solutions that seek improvement of the implied utility of the decision maker. A variety of multiobjective programming techniques have been presented in the multicriteria decision-making literature. This study reviews published studies with human subjects where some of these techniques were applied. While all of the techniques have the ability to support decision makers under conditions of multiple objectives, a number of features in applying these systems have been tested by these studies. A general evolution of techniques is traced, starting with methods relying upon linear combinations of value, to more recent methods capable of reflecting nonlinear trade-offs of value. Support of nonlinear utility and enhancing decision-maker learning are considered.