Customer Reviews

Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgement and Decision Making

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I read this book as part of a college course on cognition. It was defintely the most interesting of the 3 books we read in this class.

The book effectively teaches you how to go about making well-thought-out decisions. The text in itself is easy to read and comprehend. There are also many apt examples, both abstract and from everyday life. This combination ensures a successful reading of this book.

While I would have probably never read this book if not for the class I took, I'm glad I did and would recommend this people from all walks of life. Being able to make a good, well-thought-out, rational decision is the best skill one can have.

As a management consultant working with clients to make higher quality decisions, I have made many observations of how people (especially executives and groups) make business decisions. But observing how they make decisions is different than "why" they decide what they decide. This book provides so much insight into the "why" it is definitely worth the reading. While the book is very valuable on the "why" it is a little dated on state of the art analytic decision techniques. But with that said, I would highly recommend this book to any consultant (OE, OD, DA, etc.) working with individuals or groups where decisions are being made.

The addition of Reid Hastie as an author to Robyn Dawes' classic text on judgment and decision making was superb choice. This edition appears to be written very much in Hastie's voice, from the perspective of a cognitive psychologist. Moreover, we find additional attention paid to algebraic models, which was something that was missing from previous editions. Hastie and Dawes ranks as one of the essential readings for the judgment and decision-making field.

The authors emphasize that decision-making is a skill that can be learned and improved. As I work with career changers, I have become convinced that most of us have not learned this skill, and most of us could benefit from a careful reading of this book.

Hastie and Dawes present results of scientific psychological research, using language that is easy for the ordinary person to understand. Their examples come from everyday life and news stories: Chernobyl, the "hot hand" theory of basketball, mammography.

I would also recommend this book to any students of psychology, including those entering graduate school in social psychology, marketing or management. Hastie and Dawes demonstrate that academic studies needn't be dry, but in fact yield fascinating conclusions that are widely relevant. At the same time, they show the way researchers think and introduce the notion of probability in a way that makes readers want to learn more.

For my graduate course in Judgment and Decision Making this was one of our texts - and I have to say I appreciate that very much. I won't be selling this one back - and in fact have already started to work on my own decision making processes using the principles my class and this text have taught me. The authors did their best to make it concise enough to easily absorb - which in my case allows me the time to learn more about the topic from current research - which I appreciate. This is a readable guide if you want it to be - it has the same issues as many texts (they use different terms for things than other researchers do, etc.) but that's normal. I would recommend this one if you really want to understand the science behind your mind.

Intended as an introductory textbook for both undergraduate and graduate students, Rational Choice In An Uncertain World lays out the foundations of decision science. In a non-technical style, Hastie and Dawes compare basic principles of rationality with actual behavior in decision-making. This book is not about what to choose, rather about how we choose.

I have used this as a graduate course textbook (and I was taught from it). While the book is partially directed at advanced undergrads, my experience is that the content is almost entirely new to most grad students in psychology, marketing, organizational behavior, strategy, finance, economics, etc. This is a book I re-read every two years.

book gives reason to why we do what we do when making judgments and why we choose what we choose.

I got this because it was required for a course that I'm taking, so it's not exactly like I was passionately driven to buy this book. I don't particularly care about psychology so the explanations and figures in the book are still boring, but the book does provide a stimulating insight into how we make decisions (it helps that the book isn't a textbook per se). But if I had just bought the book for the fun of it, I think I'd still only feel so-so about the content. Then again, this is coming from a psychology-apathetic perspective, so I don't know how someone who's interested in the field would feel.

The authors of this book,like so many other psychologists in the area of decision making under uncertainty(ambiguity)in the real world ,as opposed to risk,appear to think that "modern"behavioral decision theory started with Daniel Ellsberg and advanced on the shoulders of Tversky and Kahneman with Hogarth and Einhorn close behind.They do a good job covering the conventional wisdom of that view.Unfortunately,they ignore the seminal and path breaking contributions made to the field of decision making under uncertainty by John Maynard Keynes in his classic work,titled A Treatise on Probability in 1921.Keynes was the first to systematically develop an interval estimate(set) approach to the calculation of probabilities.Keynes was the first to specify an index to measure the ambiguity of the potential available evidence upon which a decision maker would attempt to make reliable probability estimates.Keynes called this problem the weight of the evidence problem.Forty years before Ellsberg(1961),Keynes had already specified an index to measure the completeness of the relevant available evidence,w.w was defined on the unit interval between 0 and 1,i.e.,0<=w<=1.Keynes's w index is practically the same as Ellsberg's rho index.Keynes successfully generalized the expected value rule(maximize pA=EMV)and the expected utility rule(maximize pU(A))where p is a probability,A is the outcome,and U is an appropriately differentiable utility function with his decision weight model that he called a conventional coefficient of weight and risk,c.The goal of the decision maker is to maximize cA,where c equals p/(1+q)[2w/(1+w}].Keynes's decision weight rule ,c, not only solves all of the Ellsberg paradox problems,but also the certainty ,reflection , and translation effect problems,as well as the preference reversal problems.

Book was received in a timely manner and in very good condition. Who could ask for more.