Promising new developments for a deeper insight into the traditional formal models of decision making and new conceptual tools leading to new models of a greater generality, an enhanced expressive power or a better computational efficiency
Many types of decision making settings are presented, notably with broadly perceived decision making under uncertainty, risk, etc., and use a wide array of tools including probability theory, statistics, etc.
Decision making is an omnipresent, most crucial activity of the human being, and also of virtually all artificial broadly perceived “intelligent” systems that try to mimic human behavior, reasoning and choice processes. It is quite obvious that such a relevance of decision making had triggered vast research effort on its very essence, and attempts to develop tools and techniques which would make it possible to somehow mimic human decision making related acts, even to automate decision making processes that had been so far reserved for the human beings. The roots of those attempts at a scientific analysis can be traced to the ancient times but – clearly – they have gained momentum in the recent 50 or 100 years following a general boom in science. Depending on the field of science, decision making can be viewed in different ways. The most general view can be that decision making boils down to some cognitive, mental process(es) that lead to the selection of an option or a course of action among several alternatives. Then, looking in a deeper way, from a psychological perspective this process proceeds in the context of a set of needs, preferences, rational choice of an individual, a group of individuals, or even an organization. From a cognitive perspective, the decision making process proceeds in the context of various interactions with the environment.
Editors and Affiliations
Department of Economics and Quantitative Methods, University of Catania, Catania, Italy
Salvatore Greco
Department of Computer and Management Sciences, University of Trento, Trento, Italy
Ricardo Alberto Marques Pereira
Department of Economical and Social Sciences, University of Sannio at Benevento, Benevento, Italy
Massimo Squillante
Machine Intelligence Institute, Iona College, New Rochelle, USA
Ronald R. Yager
Systems Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland
Janusz Kacprzyk
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Preferences and Decisions
Book Subtitle: Models and Applications
Editors: Salvatore Greco, Ricardo Alberto Marques Pereira, Massimo Squillante, Ronald R. Yager, Janusz Kacprzyk
