Exam 12: Decision-Making Processes

When Tanya Smith, CEO of Food Lion, reads Modern Grocer, visits other grocery stores to compare prices, and reviews daily sales figures, which step of the rational approach is she is engaging in?

In the Paramount Pictures example in the textbook, what style of decision making did Sherry Lansing use in selecting films to make?

Which of the following are characteristics of organized anarchies?

Based on the fact that the Carnegie approach relies on rich face-to-face communication, discuss limitations of the approach for organizational decision making.

The bounded rationality approach is often associated with programmed decision processes.

Which of the following are "wicked problems" associated with?

When does management science work best for making decisions?

If organized anarchy existed in the decision environment of a company in the high-tech industry, would your goal as a decision maker be to remove that organized anarchy, or to work with it? Explain.

Which of the following is recognized as a constraint and tradeoff during nonprogrammed decision making?

Which of the following is part of the garbage can model of decision making?

Which of the following research results forms the basis of the incremental model?

A decision interrupt occurs when an organization must cycle back through a previous decision and try something new.

What does the incremental decision process model emphasize?

Problem consensus, and technical knowledge about the means to solve those problems, are two of the characteristics of organizations that determine which decision approaches are used.

Assume you are involved in important decision making in a medium-size organization. Three decisions currently face your organization. One is a problem of integrating the inventory management system with your production system. A second involves the selection of another organization for an acquisition. The third is whether to continue a product line that has been losing market share. Your finance vice president believes the product line should be dropped, while the marketing manager believes that more advertising aimed at a different market will revive sales of the product. Discuss which decision-making approach is likely to be most helpful in analyzing each of these situations.

In intuitive decision making, experience and judgment rather than sequential logic or explicit reasoning are used to make decisions.

Which phase in the incremental decision process involves the shaping of a solution to an identified problem?

What is a problemistic search? What is its role in decision making?

The company where you work is concerned because of its slow and cumbersome decision-making processes. Decisions seem to cycle around and around, frequently without coming to closure. If management wanted to analyze their decision making in order to improve their processes, which particular model would you recommend? Why? How would you go about studying the problem?

Which of the following is the best description of bounded rationality?