Decision Making

Decision making is a mental process which results in the selection of an outcome among various available alternatives. I am not a good decision maker because though I can see alternatives but to apply mental process is not always easy.

Yes, there must be a course on decision making. In fact, Herbart Simon won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1978 on his theory of decision making. According to him, the most sought after ability for a manager is his ability to take perfect decisions. Even in real life, we always face situations where we are bound to take decisions. I am writing a blog post at 2 AM is my decision over sleeping or reading something.

Here, a proper study may not come into picture but only commonsense and ability to think about own betterment will do the job. I think the attributes that you noted above are necessary but only those stuffs will not make a person good decision maker. In fact, no decision can be said to be perfect. We must remember the existence of bounded rationality. Then again, there is a dichotomy of values and facts. The inherent viasness also affects decision making process of a person.


The task of rational decision making is to select the alternative that results in the more preferred set of all the possible consequences. This task can be divided into three required steps:

(1) the identification and listing of all the alternatives;
(2) the determination of all the consequences resulting from each of the alternatives; and
(3) the comparison of the accuracy and efficiency of each of these sets of consequences.