Decision Making Questions and Answers

Answer: D

Correct answer: all of the above

The research has looked at three kinds of variable together: the personality of the decision maker, the situation in which the decision is taken, and the interaction between the two. The last is what makes the field difficult - the same person decides differently in different circumstances.

Answer: C

Correct answer: planning

Planning is the step at which goals are set, alternatives predicted and the goals communicated to those who must act on them. Control is its counterpart, covering implementation and the feedback from it - and the two together form the cycle within which decisions are made and learned from.

Answer: B

Correct answer: impact

The three dimensions used to rank problems are urgency, how soon attention is needed; impact, how serious the effects are; and growth tendency, how quickly the problem will worsen if left. A problem may be urgent without being important, which is why the dimensions are assessed separately.

Answer: D

Correct answer: intuitive

Intuition here is not the absence of reasoning but reasoning that has become automatic through experience, so the decision maker reaches a judgement without being able to set out the steps. It is fast and often good in a familiar domain, and unreliable outside one.

Answer: D

Correct answer: all of the above

All three arise. A crisis demands immediate attention; a routine problem recurs and is handled by procedure; and a missed opportunity is a problem too, though a less visible one. The third is the easiest to overlook, since nothing has gone wrong - something has merely not gone right.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Expectations

March’s garbage can model identifies four streams flowing independently through an organisation: problems, solutions, participants and choice opportunities. A decision happens when they happen to coincide. Expectations is not among them - and the absence of anything so orderly is the point of the model.

Answer: A

Correct answer: delphi technique

The Delphi technique gathers judgements in writing and in rounds, with a summary of the group’s responses fed back before each new round. Because the participants never meet, no one dominates and no one is swayed by status, which is what makes it useful for forecasting and for genuinely contested questions.

Answer: A

Correct answer: past costs

A cost already incurred is the same whatever is now decided, so it cannot distinguish between the alternatives and is irrelevant to the choice. Only costs that differ between the alternatives - future and differential - are relevant, and opportunity costs are relevant for precisely that reason: they differ according to what is chosen.

Answer: B

Correct answer: making decisions

Having predicted the outcomes of the alternatives in the third step, the fourth chooses among them. Implementation and evaluation follow as the fifth, which is where the feedback for the next cycle comes from.

Answer: C

Correct answer: making predictions

The five steps run: identify the problem and the uncertainties; obtain information; make predictions about the future; choose among alternatives; and implement, evaluate and learn. Prediction is the third because it depends on the information gathered in the second and must precede the choice made in the fourth.