Wharton on Making Decisions

Complex business situations require careful decisions, and every decision entails risk. For managers, who walk along the cliff's edge every day, it is crucial to ask the right questions and analyze situations carefully before making decisions that will have a lasting impact on their organizations and their careers. But what are the right questions? What is the impact of rapid change and increasing complexity? How can managers use new technologies to improve decisions? In Wharton on Making Decisions, distinguished researchers and thinkers from America's premier business school reveal the latest methods in analyzing alternative options and making choices-drawn from several decades of research into the psychological, interactive, and temporal aspects of decision making. They offer important insights on how to improve the decision-making process in different settings to produce outstanding outcomes. Wharton on Making Decisions explains the role of personal emotion and everyday reasoning in managerial decision making; discusses ways to combine computer models with personal intuition; and investigates new tools for making decisions in increasingly complex environments. The Wharton experts analyze the impact of strategic learning, personal reputation, and deception in negotiated decisions. They also explore the impact of decision making on society as a whole, examining unexpected responses to medical testing, the impact of values on decisions, the phenomenon of information cascades, and how to deal with low-probability, high-consequence events. Each chapter describes how decisions are actually made, presents an ideal scenario, and provides practical suggestions on how to make smarter decisions. The objective is to enable business managers to strengthen their decision-making skills and apply the latest methods of analysis and reasoning to decisions facing them. Supplemented with real-world examples such as the fall of Barings Bank and the space shuttle Challenger disaster, Wharton on Making Decisions is must reading for every manager who wants to make the right decision the first time, every time.