Search

Guldmann's model indicated very small benefits over costs for the optimal decision versus a wide collection of nonoptimal solutions. Savings seem to be about one per cent of costs. It indicated that for stable markets for gas there is little need for extensive decision analysis. An objective analysis is needed to justify rates in a regulated industry. Analysis is also needed to help in exploration decisions. Gas storage will become more important in the future and more analytic methodologys will need to be developed, not fewer.

As the United States has become a more litigious society, executives are finding more of their time and their firms' resources consumed by litigation. This paper attempts to assist their decision making with regard to legal matters by looking at the following questions: (1) Under what conditions should a potential plaintiff litigate a specific issue? (2) Under what conditions should a defendant faced with a lawsuit respond forcefully to it? (3) How can legal expenses be budgeted and controlled by both sides? (4) What are the most likely conditions under which both plaintiff and defendant would be willing to seek out of court settlement? The research determines the economic requisites of both a plaintiff's decision to litigate an issue and the corresponding defendant's decision on how to respond to the suit. The decisions are viewed as both commensurate and competitive with other managerial operating , e.g. capital budgeting and market expansion, that make demands upon the firm's resources. Models from economics and learning theory are employed both to illustrate the relationship between expenditures on a civil suit and the probability of success and to show how litigation costs should be budgeted and controlled. The research also shows both the means conditions under which it is advantageous from both sides to seals an out of court settlements and the to estimate the probability of out of court settlement in civil litigation in general. This latter is shown under the most general conditions to be a minimum of 0.66 and to rise as the participants in the litigation become more risk averse. (Reprinted by Permission of Publisher.)

This paper attempts to relate the conditions that require different planning approaches. A theoretical planning framework is presented that considers the confidence of causal linkages coupled with the extent of environmental change. Prior planning research is synthesized to speculate on the appropriate leadership and decision-making styles for single-businesses, nondiversified firms, or divisions of diversified firms. Examples of computational, consensual, contingency, and conceptual planning systems are also provided. (Reprinted by Permission of Publisher.)

Research on cognitive processes in decision making has identified heuristics that often work well but sometimes lead to serious errors. This paper presents an investigation of the performance of heuristics in a complex dynamic setting, characterized by repeated decisions with feedback. There are three components: (1) A simulated task resembling medical decision problems (diagnosis and treatment) is described. (2) Computer models of decision strategies are developed. These include models based on cognitive heuristics as well as benchmark strategies that indicate the limit of the heuristic strategies' performance. The upper benchmark is based on statistical decision theory, the lower one on random trial and error. (3) Selected task characteristics are systematically varied and their influence on performance evaluated in simulation experiments. Results indicate that task characteristics often studied in past research (e.g., symptom diagonosticity, disease base-rates) have less influence on performance relative to feedback-related aspects of the task. These dynamic characteristics are a major determinant of when heuristics perform well or badly. The results also provide insights about the costs and benefits of various cognitive heuristics. In addition, the possible contribution of this research to the design and evaluation of decision aids is considered. (Reprinted by Permission of Publisher.)

In many service systems, customers interact with an agent who directs customers to specific service facilities. Each agent, as a decision maker, seeks to allocate his-her customers to the service centers so as to optimize a measure of performance based on the customers' expected waiting time and the expected number of customers in service. In this paper, the problem of multiple agents, each optimizing his-her customer allocation decision in a stochastic service system, is analyzed as a noncooperative game. It is shown that an equilibrum point to such a game exists and sufficient conditions for which this equilibrium point is unique are also given. Finally, the relative efficiency of the multi-agent system is examined by comparing the customers' average waiting time in the multi-agent system to the one-agent case. It is shown that, in general, the multi-agent system is not as efficient as the one-agent nn terms of customer welfare. (Reprinted by Permission of Publisher.)

Market share attraction models, which specify that a firm's market share is equal to the ratio of its 'attraction' to the total attraction for all firms, have received increasing attention in recent years. However, there has been little research investigating the practical implications of such models. This paper presents a game-theoretic analysis of such a model and deduces the strategic implications of a Nash equilibrium solution to the model. It is shown that these implications are consistent with previous empirical research in marketing and business policy. (Reprinted by Permission of Publisher.)

This paper discusses whether the form of information (numeric or non-numeric) being presented affects the use of this information by decision makers. Corporate annual reports were evaluated as a test. Relative weights placed on different information forms were determined by an averaging model from information integration theory. Financial analysts may give more weight to non-numeric information in evaluating a company.