Mid Sweden University

Decision‐makers in organisations and businesses make numerous decisions every day, and these decisions are expected to be based on facts and carried out in a rational manner. However, most decisions are not based on precise information or careful analysis due to several reasons. People are, e.g., unable to behave rationally as a result of their experiences, socialisation, and additionally, because humans possess fairly limited capacities for processing information in an objective manner. In order to circumvent this human incapacity to handle decision situations in a rational manner, especially those involving risk and uncertainty, a widespread suggestion, at least in managerial decision making, is to take advantage of support in the form of decision support systems. One possibility involves decision analytical tools, but they are, almost without exception, not efficiently employed in organisations and businesses. It appears that one reason for this is the high demands the tools place on the decision‐maker in a variety of ways, e.g., by presupposing that reliable input data is obtainable by an exogenous process. Even though the reliability of current decision analytic tools is highly dependent on the quality of the input data, they rarely contain methods for eliciting data from the users. The problem focused on in this thesis is the unavailability and inefficiency of methods for eliciting decision information from the users. The aim is to identify problem areas regarding the elicitation of decision data in real decision making processes, and to propose elicitation methods that take people’s natural choice strategies and natural behaviour into account. In this effort, we have identified a conceptual gap between the decision‐makers, the decision models, and the decision analytical tools, consisting of seven gap components. The gap components are of three main categories (of which elicitation is one). In order to study elicitation problems, a number of empirical studies, involving more than 400 subjects in total, have been carried out in Sweden and Brazil. An iterative research approach has been adopted and a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods has been used. Findings made in this thesis include the fact that decision‐makers have serious problems in many decision situations due to not having access to accurate and relevant data in the first place, and secondly, not having the means for retrieving such data in a proper manner, i.e. lacking elicitation methods for this purpose. Employing traditional elicitation methods in this realm yield results that reveal an inertia gap, i.e. an intrinsic inertia in people’s natural behaviour to shift between differently framed prospects, and different groups of decisionmakers displaying different choice patterns. Since existing elicitation methods are unable to deal with the inertia, we propose a class of methods to take advantage of this natural behaviour, and also suggest a representation for the elicited information. An important element in the proposed class of methods is also that we must be able to fine‐tune methods and measuring instruments in order to fit into different types of decision situations, user groups, and choice behaviours.

This paper presents a comparative study between two groups from different cultural contexts, Sweden and Brazil, when choosing among risky prospects. The study explores whether there are differences in choice behaviours when the uncertainty in the prospects is expressed as interval estimates instead of the traditional use of point estimates, as well as when prospects are displayed with and without expected monetary values. Both groups display similar choice behaviours when they choose among prospects where uncertainty is expressed as point vs. interval estimates, whereas the Brazilian respondents are more affected by EMV information. The results indicate that the employment of intervals to represent uncertainty can be beneficial and could facilitate the elicitation part in the use and development of decision analytical tools. Furthermore, there is a need for more flexible tools, more adapted to a prescriptive approach, since people from different cultural contexts seem to differ in their choice behaviours.

This paper presents a study focussing on deviations from normative behavior in risk elicitation. Such deviations have implications on the process of eliciting reliable input data in applications of decision analysis. No existing elicitation method seems to be universally useful based on the findings made in this study. Since people obviously do not act in accordance with the normative rules, and different choice strategies have been identified, a prescriptive approach with individual assistance of the decision makers in the elicitation process thus seems to be necessary.

This paper focuses on managerial decision making under risk and uncertainty. Since no one, so far, has studied managers' risk attitudes in parallel with their actual behavior when handling risky prospects the area still remains relatively murky. Interviews have been done with 12 managers in the Swedish forest industry concerning how they define risk, how they handle risk, how they make risky decisions, and how the organizational context affects the decision-making process. Problems that have been identified in this study are the lack of information and precise objective data, that risk and probability estimations made by the managers are often based on inadequate information and intuition, that no formal analysis is carried out, that no computer based decision tools are used in the decision making processes, and therefore most decisions are based on intuition and gut feeling.

A main problem in decision support contexts is that unguided decision making is difficult and can lead to inefficient decision processes and undesired consequences. Therefore, decision support systems (DSSs) are of prime concern to any organization and there have been numerous approaches to delivering decision support from, e.g., computational, mathematical, financial, philosophical, psychological, and sociological angles. A key observation, however, is that effective and efficient decision making is not easily achieved by using methods from one discipline only. This paper describes some efforts made by the DECIDE Research Group to approach DSS development and decision making tools in a cross-disciplinary way.

This paper presents a study focusing on deviations from normative behavior in risk elicitation. Such deviations haveimplications on the process of eliciting reliable input data in applications of decision analysis. No existing elicitation method seems to be universally useful based on the findings made in this study. Since people obviously do not act in accordance with the normative rules, and different choice strategies have been identified, a prescriptive approach with individual assistance of the decision makers in the elicitation process thus seems to benecessary.

Decision analysis tools are an effective way of structuring complex decision situations. However, their failure to incorporate reliable methods for elicitation is a shortcoming that needs to be dealt with. Since different elicitation methods have shown to yield different results, it is important to more thoroughly emphasize on aspects that can reduce biased results. The development of methods that explicitly recognize framing problems and aim to reduce these effects are needed. This study deals with framing problems within elicitation and how to reduce discrepancies between normative and descriptive behaviour in elicited risk data. The results indicate that the extra transitional state in one of the presentation formats, here referred to as Trade for, generated data that deviated more from normative rules when participants experienced gain prospects. On the other hand, for loss prospects the format more in line with normative rules depended on the presentation order of probabilities.