BUSINESS RESEARCH FOR DECISION MAKING

Business Research for Decision Making

Business Research for Decision Making

Introduction

The work of managers, of scientists, of engineers, of lawyers--the work that steers the course of society and its financial and governmental organizations--is largely work of making decisions and solving problems. It is work of choosing issues that need attention, setting goals, finding or designing suitable courses of action, and evaluating and choosing among alternative actions.(Facione, 2004) The first three of these activities--fixing agendas, setting goals, and designing actions--are usually called difficulty solving; the last, evaluating and choosing, is usually called decision making. Nothing is more important for the well-being of society than that this work be presented competently, that we address successfully the many problems needing attention at the national grade (the allowance and trade deficits, AIDS, national security, the mitigation of earthquake damage), at the grade of business organizations (product enhancement, effectiveness of output, alternative of investments), and at the grade of our individual lives (choosing a career or a school, buying a house).

 

Discussion

The abilities and skills that work out the quality of our decisions and difficulty solutions are stored not only in more than 200 million human heads, but also in tools and machines, and especially today in those machines we call computers. This finance of brains and its attendant machines pattern the basis of our American ingenuity, an ingenuity that has allowed U.S. society to reach remarkable levels of financial productivity.

There are nothing less promising or important targets for basic scientific research than understanding how human minds, with and without the assist of computers, solve problems and make decisions competently, and advancing our problem-solving and decision-making capabilities.(Lauwereyns,2010) In psychology, economics, mathematical statistics, operations research, political science, artificial understanding, and cognitive science, major research gains have been made throughout the past half 100 years in understanding difficulty solving and decision making. The progress already achieved holds forward the promise of stimulating new advances that will assist substantially to our nation's capacity for dealing intelligently with the range of issues, large and small, that battle us.(Facione, 2004)

Much of our existing information about decision making and difficulty solving, drawn from from this research, has already been put to use in a broad variety of applications, encompassing procedures used to assess pharmaceutical safety, inventory command methods for industry, the new professional systems that embody artificial understanding techniques, procedures for modeling power and environmental systems, and analyses of the stabilizing or destabilizing effects of alternative defense strategies. (Application of the new inventory command techniques, for example, has enabled American corporations to decrease their inventories by hundreds of millions of dollars since World War II without increasing the incidence of stockouts.) Some of the information gained through the research describes the ways in which persons actually proceed about making decisions and solving problems; some of it prescribes better methods, proposing advice for the enhancement of the process.(Facione, 2004)

Central to the body of prescriptive information about decision making has been the idea of subjective anticipated utility (SEU), a sophisticated ...