Chapter 6
Managerial Decision Making
© 2020 Cengage Learning®. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
Types of Decisions and Problems
A decision is a choice made from available alternatives.
Decision making is the process of identifying problems and opportunities and then resolving them.
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© 2020 Cengage Learning®. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
Programmed and Nonprogrammed Decisions
Programmed decisions involve situations that have occurred often enough to enable decision rules to be developed and applied in the future.
Nonprogrammed decisions are made in response to situations that are unique, are poorly defined and largely unstructured, and have important consequences for the organization.
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© 2020 Cengage Learning®. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
Facing Uncertainty and Ambiguity (1 of 2)
Certainty: All the information the decision maker needs is fully available.
Risk: A decision has clear-cut goals and good information is available, but future outcomes associated with each alternative are subject to some chance of loss or failure.
Uncertainty: Managers know which goals they wish to achieve, but information about alternatives and future events is incomplete.
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© 2020 Cengage Learning®. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
Facing Uncertainty and Ambiguity (2 of 2)
Ambiguity: The goal to be achieved or the problem to be solved is unclear, alternatives are difficult to define, and information about outcomes is unavailable.
Wicked decisions: associated with conflicts over goals and decision alternatives, rapidly changing circumstances, fuzzy information, unclear links among decision elements, and the inability to evaluate whether a proposed solution will work
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© 2020 Cengage Learning®. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
6.1 Conditions That Affect the Possibility of Decision Failure
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© 2020 Cengage Learning®. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
The Ideal, Rational Model of Decision Making
The classical model of decision making is based on rational economic assumptions and managers’ beliefs about what ideal decision making should be.
Normative means that it defines how a decision maker should make decisions.
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© 2020 Cengage Learning®. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
The Administrative Model (1 of 2)
The administrative model is considered to be descriptive meaning that it describes how managers actually make decisions in complex situations.
Bounded rationality means that people have limits, or boundaries, on ...