Descriptive decision making methods

Mr. Simon noted the undevelopedness of such problems. Meanwhile, they form a class of problems that are fairly common in practice.

• Problems of making strategic decisions of an economic and political nature. The main characteristics of such problems are qualitative, there are no sufficiently reliable quantitative models.
• Problems of planning research and development ( R & D ), competitive selection of such projects.
• Also, most personal problems of choice (for example, problems of choice of profession, work, etc.), and a number of other problems characteristic of the socio-economic sphere of human activity.

Unstructured problems have some specific features ^[2] :

• They are problems of a unique choice in the sense that each time the problem is new for the decision maker or has new features compared to the previously encountered similar problem.
• They are associated with uncertainty in evaluating alternative solutions to a problem, which is objectively due to incomplete information at the time of solving the problem.
• Evaluations of alternative solutions to the problem have a qualitative character and are most often formulated verbally.
• The overall assessment of alternatives can be obtained only on the basis of objective preferences of the decision maker (or a group of decision makers). The decision maker's intuition, his belief in one or another course of events, are the basis of the decision rule that allows one to move from individual assessments to an overall assessment of alternatives.

With unstructured goals, the “best choice” problem turns out to be unrealizable in principle, since it is completely unclear what should be considered the best choice because it is impossible to quantify both the goal and the alternatives. And even pairwise comparison of alternatives between themselves is extremely difficult. In such problems it is impossible to formulate even very vague performance criteria. The task of the researcher who prepares the solution, in this case, is limited to studying the psychophysical characteristics of the decision maker, revealing its features that are important for decision making, such as focus on achieving the goal, the presence of permanent and changing properties. The researcher seeks to help decision makers in the decision-making process, to explain and anticipate the behavior of decision makers.

The most important task of the analyst (researcher, specialist in decision-making) is to study the system of preferences of decision makers and the construction of decision rules that reflect these preferences. At the same time, the analyst studies the objective parameters of the model, the organization to which the decision maker belongs, the external environment. Consequently, there is an objective component in the model (or an auxiliary model). But the analyst must build this auxiliary model in accordance with the system of preferences of a particular decision maker.

Managers themselves (decision makers) tend to use simplifications, and sometimes conflicting decision rules. And the reasons here are not so much in the individual characteristics of this or that decision maker, but in the objective characteristics of the human information processing system, which impose restrictions on all human behavior.

The help of the analyst is important primarily in clarifying the structure of the problem, then in developing a rule for evaluating solution options (decision rule). Another role of such procedures is to organize the assistance of decision makers in understanding the limitations imposed on the decisions of the objective component of the decision-making model. (The natural desire of the decision maker to provide the best values ​​for all the criteria under consideration is faced with the limitations contained in the auxiliary model).

The search for a compromise in the conditions of restrictions is the main content of the work of the decision maker in decision-making tasks with an objective auxiliary model. Thus, the descriptive decision-making theory studies the subject's actual behavior in the decision-making process, the motives by which it is guided.

Descriptive theory develops systems of concepts that allow to describe and explain human behavior as a system of purposeful actions, analyzes the role of such concepts as "experience", "intuition", "thinking", "feeling" in the process of solving problems, in the decision-making process, explores the main ways Resolving a person’s dissatisfaction in a problem situation.