Irrational Economist_ Making Decisions in a Dangerous World - Erwann Michel-Kerjan [128]
For example, the evolution of the study of decision sciences has embraced the area of negotiations, and I am pleased to see that. As the world is becoming more complex, we now grapple with decisions with multiple conflicting objectives. In a sense this area of study is not new, but on the other hand it was not featured in the 1960s and 1970s. And the work of Howard Kunreuther and Paul Slovic and others helped to establish it as a branch of the decision sciences.
Likewise, “organization theory,” the design of organizations, overlaps with the decision sciences, broadly interpreted. There is also the practical matter of how people will design the processes of decision making in the future. Setting up constitutions is a good example.
Let’s suppose we were setting up a new nation-state and we had to worry about how to decide what to do, and about the process of deciding collectively. We might set up in our constitution schemes that would facilitate and also inhibit certain decisions to be taken in the future. For example, our constitution might make provisions for various commissions; in addition, we might establish a minimum necessary number or percentage of votes, for new laws to be enacted. These are ways of resolving problems in the future, which I think belong in the domain of decision sciences. However, in order to successfully negotiate the constitution, people in charge of these negotiations would have to be trained in decision sciences and be able to use this training purposefully. To ensure successful negotiations, you need to know not only who the key interested parties are but also what their short-term and long-term objectives are. Ideally you also need to know how the other parties process the information you might give them.
Unfortunately, most people who do negotiations do not think of them as constructive joint problem solving—although this is what they are—and we need to look at them in this way. I think that, in the future, negotiations will be thought of as a form of collaborative decision making. The mediator, the arbiter, the conciliator—all play important roles in decision making. I find it troubling that there are books on decision making being published that don’t address the idea of arbitration or mediation. That has to change. I would like to see an expository book written covering decision sciences’ broadest details, with sections on organization theory and political science, including how to write and negotiate constitutions, with a heavy emphasis on multiple conflicting attributes.
SOME OF MY DISAPPOINTMENTS
I’m very proud of my role in the development of our field of decision analysis, but here are a few of my disappointments:
1. I sometimes wonder whether, over the years, decision analysis and the decision sciences have played an important enough role in public affairs, business affairs, and foreign affairs. I think more use should have been made of the qualitative as opposed to the quantitative aspects of decision science theory. There should also have been more documented debates using decision trees without numbers—that is, without probabilities and utilities. I should have documented the occasional verbal accounts of some of my former students who reported the role of the qualitative decision diagram in structuring the debate of certain ticklish issues within the firms they worked for after leaving Harvard.
2. There is a vigorous, ongoing debate among statisticians about the appropriateness of using judgmental probabilities in statistical analyses of experimental studies. I am a strong member of the Bayesian camp who argues that those on the opposing side—the classicists in their quest for objectivity—often distort the real decision problem. The classicists report probabilistically about X, because they know how to do this without resorting