ABSTRACT
Beach and Mitchell (1978) examined the question of why decision makers do not always select optimal methods for making decisions. They refer to these methods as strategies and define them as (a) the procedures the decision maker engages in when attempting to choose among alternative courses of action, and (b) the decision rule that dictates how the results of those procedures will be used to make the final choice. They describe a variety of strategies, ranging from formal decision analysis with all of its prescriptive procedures to very informal strategies such as flipping a coin, the use of homilies, or reliance on habit.
