ABSTRACT
The quotes above, taken from interviews with experienced managers, are vivid testimonies that decision makers in the real world can rarely reduce uncertainty altogether by collecting "enough information." As students of decision making have also been long aware of this problem, coping with uncertainty has been, and continues to be, a central issue in Decision Theory and Behavioral Decision Theory. This paper explores three questions: (a) What are the limitations of the Reduce, Quantify and Plug (R.Q.P.) heuristic, which Decision and Behavioral Decision Theories prescribe for coping with uncertainty? (b) How do decision makers actually cope with uncertainty? (c) What are the implications of the answers to these questions for understanding and improving naturalistic decision making?
