A common problem with governance is that rules accumulate over time. They are added and adapted to handle new situations, new behaviors, and, or have a broader and deeper impact. As rules accumulate, and become more interdependent and specialized, complexity of governance increases. What are the consequences?
Decision governance is used to change decision-making processes in organizations. This text outlines various models of such processes, which were proposed in research on organizational theory.
Models of individual decision-making in psychology identify psychological factors that shape individual decision-making. Decision governance will influence these factors, which makes it necessary to at the very least be aware of them, as a basis of thinking about how they may interplay with guidelines and processes introduced through governance.
This text is an outline of common approaches in economics research for modeling group decision-making, focusing on their main concepts, applications, and the questions they raise for the design of decision governance.
Decision-making models in economics are simplified descriptions of how decisions are made. Understanding these models is useful for designing decision governance.
How can you tell if there is a need to do anything to influence how decisions are made, that is, to govern decisions? If any of the following apply, then it is worth investing effort to improve how decisions are made.
To say that something is able to decide requires that it is able to conceive more than the single course of action in a situation where it is triggered to act, that it can compare these alternative courses of action prior to choosing one, and that it likes one over all others as a result…
What are the implications of seeing requirements satisfaction as a case of utility maximization? Expected Utility Theory is the mainstream framework (or, at least the one taught first) in economics for conceptualizing rational decision making. Can the problem of satisfying some given set of requirements be translated into that framework? What, if anything, is gained…
Given a set of requirements to satisfy, and assuming they can be satisfied together, are we always aiming to find the solution that maximizes the level of satisfaction of all these requirements? Maximization of satisfaction, or more generally, finding an optimal solution to given requirements, is a common way of thinking about what we want…