Framing Decisions: Decision-Making that Accounts for Irrationality, People and Constraints

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Toward an Empirically Rooted Understanding of Decision Making

Traditional approaches to the theory and practice of decision making have largely been normative. By traditional, I am referring to what is taught in standard decision-making courses and written in most decision-making books and articles. By normative, I refer to the fact that the traditional approaches are prescriptive, pointing out optimal ways to make decisions through the use of mathematical and statistical formulations or by following a series of well-defined, logical problem-solving steps. They place great emphasis on being rational, with many books offering tips for avoiding irrationality. The greatest beneficiaries of traditional approaches have been engineers, operations ...