Decision Making - Everyday Techniques

Everyday Techniques

Some known decision making techniques include:

• Pros and cons: listing the advantages and disadvantages of each option, popularized by Plato and Benjamin Franklin. Contrast the costs and benefits of all alternatives. Also called Rational decision making.
• Simple prioritization: choosing the alternative with the highest probability-weighted utility for each alternative (see Decision analysis)
• Satisficing: examining alternatives only until an acceptable one is found.
• Elimination by Aspects: choosing between alternatives using Mathematical psychology Technique was introduced by Amos Tversky in 1972. It is a covert elimination process that involves comparing all available alternatives by aspects. The decision-maker chooses an aspect; any alternatives without that aspect are eliminated. The decision-maker repeats this process with as many aspects as needed until there remains only one alternative

Preference Trees: In 1979 Amos Tversky and Shmuel Sattach updated the elimination by aspects technique by presenting a more ordered and structured way of comparing the available alternatives. This technique compared the alternatives by presenting the aspects in a decided and sequential order. It became a more hierarchical system in which the aspects are ordered from general to specific

• Acquiesce to a person in authority or an "expert", just following orders
• Flipism: flipping a coin, cutting a deck of playing cards, and other random or coincidence methods
• Prayer, tarot cards, astrology, augurs, revelation, or other forms of divination
• Taking the most opposite action compared to the advice of mistrusted authorities (parents, police officers, partners ...)
• Opportunity cost: calculating the opportunity cost of each options and decide the decision
• Bureaucratic: set up criteria for automated decisions
• Political: negotiate choices among interest groups

An emerging need of using software for decision making process is happening for individuals and businesses. This happens due to the complexity of many decions that have to be made today, and require to think of different stakeholders, categories, elements, or factors that impact high-level decisions.