ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the broad topic of human decision making and decision support. A complete treatment of human decision making is well beyond the scope of a single book chapter. The topic has its roots in economics and is currently a focus of operations research and management science, psychology, sociology, and cognitive engineering. These fields have produced numerous models and a substantial body of research on human decision making. At least three objectives have motivated this work: to develop normative prescriptions that can guide decision makers, to describe how people make decisions and compare the results to normative prescriptions, and to determine how to help people apply their natural decision-making methods more successfully. The goals of this chapter are to synthesize the elements of this work into a single picture and to provide some depth of coverage in particularly important areas.
