Unprogrammed Decision Making.

The management of most company's daily operations abounds with highly programmed decisions: Consider merely the highly routinized rules that normally guide the everyday management of inventories.

Abstract

The management of most company's daily operations abounds with highly programmed decisions: Consider merely the highly routinized rules that normally guide the everyday management of inventories, production schedules, machine and manpower allocations, cost estimation, mark-up pricing, etc. The more famous scientific description of a case of highly programmed decision making is perhaps G.P.E. Clarkson's, in which it was demonstrated that the portfolio selection decisions made by a bank trust investment officer were so well programmed that his decisions could be predicted by a computer, six months after his investment rules had been elicited by an interviewee.[2] This study, in contrast. focuses on highly unprogrammed decision making. This is a subject that usually gets relegated to the mystical realm, managerial