Recession

Organizational and Individual Decision Making

Organizational and Individual Decision Making

Kathleen M. Carley Associate Prof. of Sociology and Organizations Dept. of Social and Decision Sciences Carnegie Mellon University

Dean Behrens Dept. of Social and Decision Sciences Carnegie Mellon University

Citation: Kathleen M. Carley & Dean Behrens, 1999, “Organizational and Individual Decision Making.” Ch. 18 in A.P. Sage & W. B. Rouse (eds.), Handbook of Systems Engineering and Management. John Wiley and Sons, Inc.

Organizational and Individual Decision Making

Organizational and Individual Decision Making

Abstract

Organizational decision making is a product of both the way individuals make decisions and the context in which these individuals make decisions. Current work in this area draws drom the areas of behavioral decision theory, social network, information processing, cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, and computational organization theory. Collectively, the work in this area suggests that limits to cognition and rationality and the structure of relations among individuals and organizations are equally important in determining what decisions are made. Advances in this area are facilitated by the use of computational models of organizations in which organizational decisions result from the concurrent actions and interactions among multiple distributed intelligent and adaptive agents.

Organizational and Individual Decision Making

Organizations do not make decisions, people do. This observation is a statement of both structural and operational fact: organizations (as physical realities, not accounting or legal entities) are made by, and are comprised of, people. There may be transportation, transformation, technological, computation and communication infrastructures to support human decision makers. These infrastructures generally have differential impact on the individuals in question, affect what information they have access to, and so what...