For many years, the study of decisionmaking was a small field of endeavour in the social sciences and psychology. For all the new-found significance attributed to the work by Herbert Simon (1978; 1986) (Nobel laureate in economics) and his colleagues, those genuinely concerned with understanding the full scope and nature of human decisionmaking were consigned to the margins of disciplinary resp...

Managing natural resource lands requires social, as well as biophysical, considerations. Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to accurately assess and quantify changing social preferences, and to aggregate conflicting opinions held by diverse social groups. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) provides a systematic, explicit, rigorous, and robust mechanism for eliciting and quantifying subj...

This paper critically surveys explicit models of actual decisionmaking. How are the models derived? How are the models used and evaluated? What conceivable value can the models have? Are there better practices for creating and using models of decisionmaking? Contact: Patrick D. Larkey Heinz School of Public Policy and Management Carnegie Mellon University Email: [email protected] Models of D...

RAND and other analysts have developed and refined a number of techniques for coping with uncertainty and making decisions that will have consequences over years, even generations. These techniques might be thought of in three broad categories: exercises, strategic products, and " groupware. " Drawing on earlier work in Europe, war-gaming for U.S. military planners was developed at the Naval Wa...