Decision Making in Complex Environments

SYSC 338U: Decision Making in Complex Environments

Winter 2019 Syllabus

Meets Cluster Course Requirements for University Studies:

• Knowledge, Values, and Rationality (KVR)

• Leading Social Change (LSC)

• Design Thinking Innovation Entrepreneurship (DTIE)

Course Description

The course is divided into three parts:

Part One: Focuses on understanding traditional ideas of rational decision making. It also introduces prospect theory as a foil for rational decision making and the idea that maybe people aren’t rational.

Part Two: Focuses on the interaction between the environment and human decision making. Introduced ideas about framing and ecological rationality.

Part Three: Focuses on decision making in groups and the role of institutions in group decision making. Introduces ideas about conflict and cooperation, institutions, institutional change, and institutional learning.

Objectives

Students will be able to:

• Think about decisions rationally and talk about basic ideas in decision theory, including utility and different types of decision making set ups.

• Talk about the idea of rationality and how different thinkers (traditional economic, Kahneman and Tversky, Simon and Gigerenzer) think about rationality differently.

• Reflect on the impact of the environment on decision making, including both how the environment impacts decision making on an evolutionary scale and moment from moment.

• Reflect the limits of human decision making, including the limits of their own perceptions and cognitive capabilities.

• Understand how decisions under conflict shape group decision making and the institutions we put in place.

• Understand that institutions consist of formal and informal constraints on actor's choices, which help to manage complexity by reducing uncertainty in the social environment.

• Understand how institutions emerge, how they change, and how they can be designed to help solve collective action problems.