Improving Decisions and Judgments The Desirable versus the Feasible

The purpose of this chapter is to assess the conditions and the extent to which decisions and judgments can be modified, and eventually improved. Before such an assessment can be made, however, two basic questions have to be raised. An obvious underlying assumption in the present context is that decisions are not invariably perfect, and consequently do not always lead to the desired goals. The first question then concerns a metadecision question: How should one judge the quality of decisions? Is it possible to define and identify deficient and flawed decisions, and what criteria should be used in such a process? In the first part of this chapter I will briefly address one of the more fundamental (and at the same time one of the most difficult) questions in decision sciences, namely, what constitutes a good or a poor decision and how could it be measured and assessed.

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