Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
DECISIóN hIG
How Decisioni Happen
James G. March
with the assistance of Chip Heath
Acknowledgments v
THp FnsB Pnsss Preface vii
A Division of Simon & Schuster Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
-') '
, A primer on decision making: how decisions happ en lJames G. Decision Making as Rule Following 57 ,
Politics I39
Acknowledgments
4. Multiple Actors: Conflict and
vll
viii Preface Preface lX
elaborations of history. The text tries to be faithful to what is tency. Are decisions occasions in which individuals and insti-
kno-wn about decision making as it actually takes place, but the tutions achieve coherence aqd reduce equivocality? Or are
focus is on ideas that can be used to understand decisions gen- they occasions in which inconsistency and ambiguity are ex-
erally, not on the particular details of any particular decision. hibited, exploited, and expanded?
Chapter L examines ideas of rational choice, particularly lim- The third issue is whether decision making is an instru-
ited rationality. Chapter 2 considers ideas of identity, appropri- mental activity or an interpretive activity. Are decisions to be
ateness, and history-dependent rules. Chapters 3 and 4 look at understood primarily in terms of the way they fit into a prob-
multiple-person decision making, decisions made in the face of lem solving, adaptive calculus? Or are they to be understood
inconsistency in preferences or identities. Chapter 5 treats the primafily in terms of the way they fit into efforts to establish
consequences for decision making of ambiguity in preferences, individual and social meaning?
identities, and experience. Finally, Chapter 6 considers the The fourth issue is whether outcomes of decision process-
prospects for decision engineering. es are seen as primarily attributable to the actions of au-
Underlying these clusters of ideas are several different per- tonomous actors or to the systemic properties of an interact-
spectives on decision making, with numerous variations. Stu- ing ecology. Is it possible to describe decisions as resulting
dents of decision making draw from all the disciplines of social from the intentions, identities, and interests of independent
science-anthropology, cognitive and decision science, eco- actors? Or is it necessary to emphasize the ways in which in-
nomics, organization studies, political science, psycholo {y, and dividu al actors, organ izations, an¿ societies fit together?
sociology. As ideas from those disciplines are woven into the
These issues are not resolved here, but they are exercised a bit.
story of decision making, new forms of old issues are encoun-
tered: issues of reason and ignorance, of intentionality and fate,
of coherence and conflict, of institutions, identities, and rules,
of learning and selection, of meaning and interpretation, of
preferences and obligations.
Those topics will arise naturally in their places, and their de-
tails will not be anticipated here. It may, however, be useful to
note four relatively deep (and not entirely independent) issues
that persistently divide students of decision making:
The first issue is whether decisions are to be viewed as
choice-based or rule-based. Do decision makers pursue a
logic of consequence, making choices among alternatives by
evaluating their consequences in terms of prior preferences?
Or do they pursu e alogic of appropriateness, fulfilling identi-
ties or roles by recognizingsituations and following rules that
match appropriate behavior to the situations they en-
count er?
The second issue is whether decision making is typified
moro by clarity and consistency or by amhiguity ancl inconsis-