Judgement and Decision Making

Behavioral decision research offers a distinctive approach to understanding and improving decision making. It combines theory and method from multiple disciples (psychology, economics, statistics, decision theory, management science). It employs both empirical methods, to study how decisions are actually made, and analytical ones, to study how decisions should be made and how consequential imperfections are. This book brings together key publications, selected to represent the major topics and approaches used in the field. Put in one place, with integrating commentary, it shows the common elements in a research program that represents the scope of the field, while offering depth in each. Together, they provide a vision for what has become a burgeoning field.

Baruch Fischhoff is Howard Heinz University Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, Department of Social and Decision Sciences, Department of Engineering and Public Policy.

1. Judgment and Decision Making 2. Amos Tversky 3. Hindsight Foresight: The Effect of Outcome Knowledge on Judgment Under Uncertainty 4. For those Condemned to Study the Past: Reflections on Historical Judgment 5. The Early History of Hindsight Research 6. Hypothesis Evaluation from a Bayesian Perspective 7. Knowing with Certainty: The Appropriateness of Extreme Confidence 8. Fault Trees: Sensitivity of Assessed Failure Probabilities to Problem Representation 9. Assessing Uncertainty in Physical Constants 10. Fifty/Fifty = 50? 11. Predicting Frames 12. Value Elicitation: Is there Anything in there? 13. Informed Consent in Eliciting Environmental Values 14. Giving Advice: Decision Theory Perspectives on Sexual Assault 15. The Real World: What Good is it?16. Assessing Adolescent Decision-making Competence 17. Questions of Competence: The Duty to Inform and the Limits to Choice 18. From Behavioral Decision Theory to Behavioral Decision Research