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ABSTRACTMost real‐life decisions are made with less than perfect information and there is often some opportunity to acquire additional information to increase the quality of the decision. In this article, we define and study the sequential information acquisition process of a rational decision maker (DM) when allowed to acquire any finite amount of information from a set of products defined by vectors of characteristics. The information acquisition process of the DM depends both on the values of the characteristics observed previously and the number and potential realizations of the remaining characteristics. Each time an observation is acquired, the DM modifies the probability of improving upon the products already observed with the number of observations available. We construct two real‐valued functions whose crossing points determine the decision of how to allocate each available piece of information. We provide several numerical simulations to illustrate the information acquisition incentives defining the behavior of the DM. Applications to knowledge management and decision support systems follow immediately from our results, particularly when considering the introduction and acceptance of new technological products and when formalizing online search environments.

The special session on Decision Economics (DECON) is a scientific forum held annually, which is focused on sharing ideas, projects, research results, models, and experiences associated with the complexity of behavioural decision processes and socio-economic phenomena. In 2018, DECON was held at Campus Tecnológico de la Fábrica de Armas, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Toledo, Spain, as part of the 15th International Conference on Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence. For the third consecutive year, this book have drawn inspiration from Herbert A. Simon's interdisciplinary legacy and, in particular, is devoted to designs, models, and techniques for boundedly rational decisions, involving several fields of study and expertise. It is worth noting that the recognition of relevant decision-making takes place in a range of critical subject areas and research fields, including economics, finance, information systems, small and international business management, operations, and production. Therefore, decision-making issues are of fundamental importance in all branches of economics addressed with different methodological approaches. As a matter of fact, the study of decision-making has become the focus of intense research efforts, both theoretical and applied, forming a veritable bridge between theory and practice as well as science and business organisations, whose pillars are based on insightful cutting-edge experimental, behavioural, and computational approaches on the one hand, and celebrating the value of science as well as the close relationship between economics and complexity on the other. In this respect, the international scientific community acknowledges Herbert A. Simon's research endeavours to understand the processes involved in economic decision-making and their implications for the advancement of economic professions. Within the field of decision-making, indeed, Simon has become a mainstay of bounded rationality and satisficing. His rejection of the standard (unrealistic) decision-making models adopted by neoclassical economists inspired social scientists worldwide with the purpose to develop research programmes aimed at studying decision-making empirically, experimentally, and computationally. The main achievements concern decision-making for individuals, firms, markets, governments, institutions, and, last but not least, science and research. This book of selected papers tackles these issues that Simon broached in a professional career spanning more than sixty years. The Editors of this book dedicated it to Herb.

The following article from Systems Research and Behavioral Science "Intrinsic Preferences, Revealed Preferences and Bounded Rational Decisions" by Zhao Yong and Wu Xinlin, published online on 26 June 2012 in Wiley Online Library (http://www.onlinelibrary.wiley.com; DOI: 10.1002/sres.2120), has been retracted by agreement between the authors, the journal editor, M.C. Jackson, and John Wiley & Sons. The retraction has been agreed due to unauthorized usage of material previously written by Dr Christopher J. Tyson of Queen Mary, University of London.

Framing effects are everywhere. An estate tax looks very different to a death tax. Gun safety seems to be one thing and gun control another. Yet, the consensus from decision theorists, finance professionals, psychologists, and economists is that frame-dependence is completely irrational. This book challenges that view. Some of the toughest decisions we face are just clashes between different frames. It is perfectly rational to value the same thing differently in two different frames, even when the decision-maker knows that these are really two sides of the same coin. Frame It Again sheds new light on the structure of moral predicaments, the nature of self-control, and the rationality of co-operation. Framing is a powerful tool for redirecting public discussions about some of the most polarizing contemporary issues, such as gun control, abortion, and climate change. Learn effective problem-solving and decision-making to get the better of difficult dilemmas.

Organizational theorists built their knowledge of decision making through a progressive critique of rational choice theory. Their positioning towards rationality, however, is at odds with the observation of rationality persistence in organizational life. This paper addresses this paradox. It proposes a new perspective on rationality that allows the theorizing of the production of rational decisions by organizations. To account for rationality's éternel retour, we approach rational decision making as performative praxis—a set of activities that contributes to turning rational choice theory into social reality. We develop a performative praxis framework that explains how theory, actors, and tools together produce rationality within organizations through three mechanisms: rationality conventionalization, rationality engineering, and rationality commodification. This framework offers new avenues of research on rational decision making and points to the factors that underlie the manufacture of rationality in organizations.

Effective decision-marking in the dynamic business environment is key to business performance. The relationship between intuition and rationality in decision-making has long been discussed in the relevant literature, albeit with discrepant views and inconsistent findings. Drawing on cognitive experiential self-theory (CEST), this paper examines an integrated model of antecedents and decision outcomes of intuition and rationality and how intuition and rationality in different scenarios interplay to influence decision outcomes. The study was undertaken in Australia and New Zealand. Both symmetrical (structural equation modeling or SEM) and asymmetrical (fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis or fsQCA) methods were employed to capitalize on a holistic understanding of the proposed relationships. The findings show that the fsQCA testing presents more insightful information about how different levels of factors inform intuitive and/or rational decision making and outcomes, and how it relates to SEM findings. This paper provides a novel perspective on the strategic decision-making process by integrating various decision-making situations and by deploying fuzzy or configurational and linear or symmetrical methods. The results also have implications for the relevant practitioners to consider the appropriate decision situations and their preferred decision styles to achieve optimal decision outcomes.