DECISION‐MAKING MODELS, DECISION SUPPORT, AND PROBLEM SOLVING

This chapter provides an overall perspective on human decision making to human factors practitioners, developers of decision tools, product designers, and others who are interested in how people make decisions and how decision making might be improved. It presents a broad set of prescriptive and descriptive approaches. The chapter introduces principles of rational choice suggested by classical decision theory, followed by a discussion of research on human decision making which has led to the new perspectives of behavioral decision theory and behavioral economics, and naturalistic decision models. It addresses the topic of decision support and problem solving. The main idea of adaptive decision behavior, or contingent decision behavior, is that an individual decision maker uses different strategies in different situations. The chapter also addresses methods of supporting or improving group decision making. Expert systems are developed to capture knowledge for a very specific and limited domain of human expertise.