Exam 8: Fundamentals of Decision Making

The bank teller with an out-of-balance cash drawer at the end of the day faces a unique and ill-defined problem.

Define and give examples of two of the five kinds of information processing biases common to bounded rationality decision making.

Donald Mather recognizes that he must balance the conflicting goals among his various stakeholder groups as he seeks to make an important decision. Mather will likely need to use the political model of decision making.

__________ goals are stated in qualitative terms while __________ goals are stated in quantitative terms.

When goals and the means to achieve them are perceived by stakeholders as a win-lose situation, the ability to make adaptive and innovative decisions is __________.

Michael Seim's company needs to borrow money. He decides to put the president of a local bank on his board of directors. Seim is using the political strategy of __________.

Andrea Sherman is graduating from Michigan State University in May. She wants to find a job as an elementary school teacher. It would be extremely time consuming and costly for her to evaluate every teaching job available. Most likely, Sherman will use ________.

__________ is the rigid devotion to the status quo by attempting to do more of the same old thing better.

When Heather Ruyle has full knowledge of a problem, its alternative solutions, and the results of those solutions, she makes decisions under a condition of __________.

Risk generally means that the problem and the alternative solutions fall somewhere between the extremes of being unknown and ambiguous.

Loretta Cortez is a judge. Her decision on the Graham case represents a sharp break with past decisions and she has been very careful to define the problem in the case and review prior court decisions. In this example, Cortez makes a(n) __________ decision.

The first phase in the rational decision-making model is __________.

The push and pull of stakeholders who have both power and conflicting goals occurs in the __________ decision-making model.

The bounded rationality model of decision making is particularly useful because it emphasizes the __________, thus providing a more accurate picture of the day-to-day decision- making processes used by most people.

__________ improvement involves streams of adaptive decisions made over time that result in a large number of small, incremental enhancements year after year.

In general, the decision maker should begin by defining the problem and then ________.

Dealing with uncertainty is an important facet of the jobs of many managers and other professionals, including market researchers and strategic planners.

When does a stakeholder have power in the political model of decision making?A stakeholder has power when he or she can control or influence the:

Ball Corporation has the goal to achieve 10 to 15 percent annual growth in earnings per share. This is an example of a(n) __________ goal.

In the rational decision-making model, during the "search for alternative solutions" phase, individuals or teams might engage in all of the following except _____________.