
Preface 2
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3 GROUP DECISION
A large portion of the most important decisions are made in groups. Many of those
groups are informal, a family or a collection of friends. Often, the group will have some
official status, such as a tenured faculty or a corporate board, but their decision processes
will resemble informal decision making. A typical pattern would be a discussion, a strug-
gle for consensus, and then a decision. A large portion of group decisions, like many
individual decisions, are made under conditions of uncertainty, and often of Ignorance.
Kenneth Arrow’s book, Social Choice and Individual Values (Arrow, 1951), launched an
extensiv ...