Managing Incremental Commitment: An Analytic Challenge

Decision making often consists of incremental moves toward some selected objective, which can be reconsidered as knowledge emerges - as when an individual chooses a career, or a commander picks a military course of action. Analyzing these decision strategy options as if they were single integral commitments can distort comparison. However, rigorous normative treatment of complex act-event sequences is often impractical. Alternative analytic aids to managing incremental commitment usefully are explored, e.g; evaluation of integral options adjusted for flexibility, successive decision analyses of incremental options, simplified information gathering decision trees, feedback to decider on evolving operation success, rehearsing deciders on potential recognition-primed sequences.

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