The presumptions of prescription

Abstract

How one ought to make decisions has been an important subject of study for a long time. The normative framework of the rational decision-making paradigm was widely accepted many decades ago as an ideal to follow; more recently it has been recognised that there are difficulties in conforming to this ideal. As a result a distinction has been made between normative methods - those that we would ideally like to follow - and prescriptive methods, that is, ways to prescribe how decision makers should approximate to this ideal in practice. This paper explores several approaches to prescription in this paper, and the presumptions which underlie them. Firstly, we discuss the prescriptions associated with various forms of the rational decision-making paradigm. Secondly, we examine the presumption that prescription based on the rational decision-making paradigm is the right way to go. Finally, we discuss the desirability of prescription of any form, in the light of the discussions in the previous sections.