Decision makers have become accustomed to making decisions using summarized or aggregate data through the use of financial and accounting reports. The use of aggregate data minimizes the effects of information overload on a decision maker; however it may not provide a decision maker all the details he or she would like to have. The effects of aggregated versus detailed information presentation ...

When communicating with an uninformed decision maker, the motives behind an expert’s message are often unclear. To explore this situation and investigate its impact on organizational design we extend the cheap-talk model of Crawford and Sobel (1982) to allow for uncertainty over the expert’s bias. We find that, in contrast to Dessein (2002), it is possible that the decision maker prefers commun...

Most lawyers and bioethicists recommend that patients enact a durable power of attorney for health care designating somebody as their proxy decision maker should they become unable to make decisions. Most people choose family members as their agent. But what if a patient wants his or her doctor to be his or her proxy decision maker? Can the doctor be both physician and surrogate decision maker?...

An advisory committee with common values and asymmetric information provides a recommendation to a decision maker facing a binary choice. We investigate the effect of a transparency requirement—requiring committee members’ actions to be observable—on the committee’s ability to influence the decision maker. We show that unless the preferences of the committee and decision maker are sufficiently ...

I analyze a game between an uninformed decision maker and a possibly biased expert. The expert receives a set of arguments, and each argument favors one of two alternatives. He can disclose each argument credibly, but cannot prove whether he has disclosed everything. In all equilibria, the biased expert sends messages containing arguments both for and against his preferred alternative. However,...

An AHP model suffering from significant cardinal or/and ordinal inconsistencies in its preference matrix is difficult to rank rationally the alternatives. This study proposes an iterative method to assist a decision maker to detect/adjust inconsistencies and to represent his/her judgments properly. A Gower plot is first used to detect ordinal and cardinal inconsistencies. Two optimization model...

This paper presents a decentralized method for computing Pareto-optimal solutions in multiparty negotiations over continuous issues. The method is based on the well known weighting method which is decomposed by introducing an own decision variable for each decision maker and by applying the dual decomposition method to the resulting problem. The method o€ers a systematic way for generating some...

End-of-life (EOL) decisions in families are complex and emotional sites of family interaction necessitating family members coordinate roles in the EOL decision-making process. How family members in the United States enact the decision-maker role in EOL decision situations was examined through in-depth interviews with 22 individuals who participated in EOL decision-making for a family member. A ...

This paper discusses recurrent multi-criteria, multi-attribute decision problems. Because of the possibility of decision-maker ignorance or low decision-maker involvement the decision problem structuring is done once for all by a group of experts and does not involve the implication of the decision makers. We propose an original model based on Bayesian networks, which provides a decision proces...