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. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
How do issues end up on the agenda? Why do lawmakers routinely invest in program oversight and broad policy development? What considerations drive legislative policy change? For many, Congress is an ...institution consumed by partisan bickering and gridlock. Yet the institution's long history of addressing significant societal problems - even in recent years - seems to contradict this view. Congress and the Politics of Problem Solving argues that the willingness of many voters to hold elected officials accountable for societal conditions is central to appreciating why Congress responds to problems despite the many reasons mustered for why it cannot. The authors show that, across decades of policy making, problem-solving motivations explain why bipartisanship is a common pattern of congressional behavior and offer the best explanation for legislative issue attention and policy change.
Retail shelf management means cost-efficiently aligning retail operations with consumer demand. As consumers expect high product availability and low prices, and retailers are constantly increasing ...product variety and striving towards high service levels, the complexity of managing retail business and its operations is growing enormously. Retailers need to match consumer demand with shelf supply by balancing variety (number of products) and service levels (number of items of a product), and by optimizing demand and profit through carefully calibrated prices. As a result the core strategic decisions a retailer must make involve assortment sizes, shelf space assignment and pricing levels. Rigorous quantitative methods have emerged as the most promising solution to this problem. The individual chapters in this book therefore focus on three areas: (1) combining assortment and shelf space planning, (2) providing efficient decision support systems for practically relevant problem sizes, and (3) integrating inventory and price optimization into shelf management.
The application of auto-repeat facilities in telephone systems, as well as the use of random access protocols in computer networks, have led to growing interest in retrial queueing models. Since much ...of the theory of retrial queues is complex from an analytical viewpoint, with this book the authors give a comprehensive and updated text focusing on approximate techniques and algorithmic methods for solving the analytically intractable models. Retrial Queueing Systems: A Computational Approach alsoPresents motivating examples in telephone and computer networks.Establishes a comparative analysis of the retrial queues versus standard queues with waiting lines and queues with losses.Integrates a wide range of techniques applied to the main M/G/1 and M/M/c retrial queues, and variants with general retrial times, finite population and the discrete-time case.Surveys basic results of the matrix-analytic formalism and emphasizes the related tools employed in retrial queues.Discusses a few selected retrial queues with QBD, GI/M/1 and M/G/1 structures.Features an abundance of numerical examples, and updates the existing literature.The book is intended for an audience ranging from advanced undergraduates to researchers interested not only in queueing theory, but also in applied probability, stochastic models of the operations research, and engineering. The prerequisite is a graduate course in stochastic processes, and a positive attitude to the algorithmic probability.
Resilience Engineering Woods, David D; Hollnagel, Erik
2006, 2007-11-01, 2017-03-17
eBook, Book
For Resilience Engineering, 'failure' is the result of the adaptations necessary to cope with the complexity of the real world, rather than a malfunction. Human performance must continually adjust to ...current conditions and, because resources and time are finite, such adjustments are always approximate. Featuring contributions from leading international figures in human factors and safety, Resilience Engineering provides thought-provoking insights into system safety as an aggregate of its various components - subsystems, software, organizations, human behaviours - and the way in which they interact.
Economic choice behavior entails the computation and comparison of subjective values. A central contribution of neuroeconomics has been to show that subjective values are represented explicitly at ...the neuronal level. With this result at hand, the field has increasingly focused on the difficult question of where in the brain and how exactly subjective values are compared to make a decision. Here, we review a broad range of experimental and theoretical results suggesting that good-based decisions are generated in a neural circuit within the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). The main lines of evidence supporting this proposal include the fact that goal-directed behavior is specifically disrupted by OFC lesions, the fact that different groups of neurons in this area encode the input and the output of the decision process, the fact that activity fluctuations in each of these cell groups correlate with choice variability, and the fact that these groups of neurons are computationally sufficient to generate decisions. Results from other brain regions are consistent with the idea that good-based decisions take place in OFC and indicate that value signals inform a variety of mental functions. We also contrast the present proposal with other leading models for the neural mechanisms of economic decisions. Finally, we indicate open questions and suggest possible directions for future research.
Padoa-Schioppa and Conen review recent advances on the neuronal mechanisms underlying economic choices. They propose that good-based decisions are formed in a neural circuit within the orbitofrontal cortex.
Revisiting Cyert and March's classic 1963 'Behavioral Theory of the Firm', Henrich Greve offers an intriguing analysis of how firms evolve in response to feedback about their own performance. Based ...on ideas from organizational theory, social psychology, and economics, he explains how managers set goals, evaluate performance, and determine strategic changes. Drawing on a range of studies, including the author's own analysis of the Japanese shipbuilding industry, he reports on how theory fits evidence on organizational change of risk-taking, research and development expenses, innovativeness, investment in assets, and in market strategy. The findings suggest that high-performing organizations quickly reduce their rates of change, but low-performing organizations only slowly increase those rates. Analysis of performance feedback is an important direction for research and this book provides valuable insights in how organizational learning interacts with other influences on organizational behaviour such as competitive rivalry and institutional influences.
"This textbook for students and practitioners presents a practical approach to decomposition techniques in optimization. It provides an appropriate blend of theoretical background and practical ...applications in engineering and science, which makes the book interesting for practitioners, as well as engineering, operations research and applied economics graduate and postgraduate students. ""Decomposition Techniques in Mathematical Programming"" is based on clarifying, illustrative and computational examples and applications from electrical, mechanical, energy and civil engineering as well as applied mathematics and economics. It addresses decomposition in linear programming, mixed-integer linear programming, nonlinear programming, and mixed-integer nonlinear programming, and provides rigorous decomposition algorithms as well as heuristic ones. Practical applications are developed up to working algorithms that can be readily used. The theoretical background of the book is deep enough to be of interest to applied mathematicians. It includes end of chapter exercises and the solutions of the even numbered exercises are included as an appendix."
The objective of this book is to present this analytical framework and to illustrate how it can be used in the investigation of economic decisions under risk. In a sense, the economics of risk is a ...difficult subject: it involves understanding human decisions in the absence of perfect information. How do we make decisions when we do not know some of events affecting us? The complexities of our uncertain world and of how humans obtain and process information make this difficult. In spite of these difficulties, much progress has been made. First, probability theory is the corner stone of risk assessment. This allows us to measure risk in a fashion that can be communicated among decision makers or researchers. Second, risk preferences are now better understood. This provides useful insights into the economic rationality of decision making under uncertainty. Third, over the last decades, good insights have been developed about the value of information. This helps better understand the role of information in human decision making and this book provides a systematic treatment of these issues in the context of both private and public decisions under uncertainty.
* Balanced treatment of conceptual models and applied analysis * Considers both private and public decisions under uncertainty * Website presents application exercises in EXCEL
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