Decision making is said to be a psychological construct. This means that although we can never "see" a decision, we can infer from visible behaviour that a decision has been made. Therefore we finish that a psychological event that we call "decision making" has occurred. It is a construction that imputes obligation to action. That is, based on observable actions, we assume that people have made a commitment to effect the action.

Decision making is a significant part of many professions, where specialists apply their skill in a given area to making informed decisions. For example, medical decision making often involves making an analysis and selecting a suitable treatment. Due to the large number of considerations involved in many decisions, decision support systems have been developed to assist decision makers in considering the implications of various courses of action. They can help reduce the risk of errors.

Important Points in Decision Making

• Objectives must first be established
• Objectives must be classified and placed in order of significance
• Alternative actions must be developed
• The alternative must be evaluated against all the objectives
• The alternative that is able to achieve all the objectives is the tentative decision
• The tentative decision is evaluated for more possible consequences

SEU THEORY

The development of SEU psychology theory was a major academic achievement of the first half of this century. It gave for the first time an officially axiomatized statement of what it would mean for an agent to behave in a reliable, rational matter. It assumed that a decision maker possessed a utility function, that all the alternatives among which choice could be made were known, and that the consequences of choosing each alternative could be ascertained.

By admitting personally assigned probabilities, SEU theory opened the way to fusing subjective opinions with objective data, an approach that can also be used in man-machine decision-making systems. In the probabilistic version of the theory, Bayes's rule prescribes how people should take account of new information and how they should respond to unfinished information.

Most of the tools of modern operations research--not only linear programming, but also integer programming, queuing theory, decision trees, and other widely used techniques--use the guess of SEU theory. They assume that what is desired is to maximize the achievement of some goal, under specified constraints and assuming that all alternatives and consequences are known. These tools have proven their value in a wide range of applications.

Types:

Using these three major types puts you in a position to use again the knowledge created through before made decisions. Generally, decisions are made in the context of the individual, or an organization or business. While consumer decision making is made in both an individual and business environment, we have chosen to make this a divide type because of the common knowledge elements that can benefit decisions made in either domain. 

• Business decision making includes decisions that are made that determine business or organization outcomes.

• Personal decision making has the decisions that determine who we are as individuals and the outcomes we create for ourselves and others with which we have relationships. This category includes what is sometimes referred to as life decisions.

• Consumer decision making consists of choices that determine our effectiveness in purchase decisions that occur in either a personal or business context. In this case, the consumer (entity) can be an individual or a person within a business.