ABSTRACT
Decision making refers to the selection of a course of action from a set of alternatives. This topic is of interest to both economists and psychologists. Economists develop models to describe ideal choice behavior. These are called normative models. Psychologists are interested in descriptive models of how people actually behave. Some psychologists develop descriptive models by observing decision making in artificial but controlled laboratory studies. Others do so by conducting field studies of decision-making behavior in everyday life. Rather different views of decision making have emerged from these two approaches.
