
What is success in life and why the process of choice must be rational.
Course content.
Terms used in the decision-making process will be discussed:
1) decision maker;
2) alternative;
3) criteria;
4) quantitative methods;
5) qualitative methods.
The causes of choice errors will be considered from the point of view of the human information processing system:
1) memory model - short-term memory, storage, chunk;
2) human abilities as a measuring instrument - heuristics and bias.
The qualitative method of making rational decisions CPRS - Closed Procedures near Reference Situations - will be considered.
The meaning and goal of the method.
Building of the UOS – a unified ordinal scale.
An example is choosing a job.
The qualitative method of making rational decisions “Paired Compensations” will be considered.
The meaning and goal of the method.
An example is choosing a country house.
The analytic hierarchy process of decisions making for choosing the best alternative or the Saaty method (quantitative method) will be considered.
The meaning and goal of the method.
Building of criteria hierarchies.
Building of alternatives hierarchies based on criteria values.
An example is choosing a lawnmower for a country house.
What is life success?
This is the ratio of successfully made, that is, right decisions to the total number of decisions that you make in your life. And it has nothing to do with business, it has to do with your life.
Because every day we make decisions one way or another. We make them for the most part unconsciously and intuitively. And when we don't understand the rules of decision making, when we don’t understand in what cases our intuition fails us greatly - this leads, of course, to a large number of errors...
But the rational, that is, the best choice in a given situation means the assumption that a person's decision is the result of an orderly thinking process.
I propose to study 3 simple decision-making methods and the following course content:
1) in order to speak the same language, let’s define the terms - there are few of them;
2) in order to better understand ourselves, let’s understand the reasons for erroneous decisions;
3) we will study two methods based on the so-called qualitative data, that is, without numbers and calculators, only with a piece of paper and a pen - this is CPRS method;
4) and “Paired Compensations” method;
5) and a mixed qualitative-numerical method, where a calculator, or spreadsheets such as Excel, may be needed - this is the so-called the analytic hierarchy process of decisions making or Saaty method (named after the author).
Interesting examples will be given when studying each method.