Decision Science - Online Discussions

These discussions are opportunities to meet people who are interested in decision science and to playfully and respectfully discuss decision science ideas, research, applications, career options and news. The purpose of these discussions is to learn decision science, facilitate personal growth, cultivate community, and to have fun.

You can find dates for upcoming discussions and RSVP on our meetup group.

Decision science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of decision making. Like most interdisciplinary fields, there are several competing approaches. It has become standard to divide decision science into descriptive decisions science and prescriptive decision science. Descriptive decision science is about how agents make decisions and what factors influence these decisions. Prescriptive decision science is about methods for helping agents formulate their objectives and then make optimal use of data to make decisions that meet their objectives as well as possible.

See:

• INSEAD - Decision Sciences

• Harvard Center for Health Decision Science - What is Decision Science?

There are several good reasons to learn and practice decision science, including:

• To make better decisions,

• To better understand and predict people's decisions,

• To more effectively influence people's decisions, and

• To engineer better artificial decision makers and decision support systems.

Here are a couple of good talks on YouTube about decision science or about topics in decision science:

• Strategic Decisions Group - Decision Science for Data Scientists

• Paul Glimcher - Neuroeconomics and the Future of the Decision Sciences

• Warren B. Powell - Universal Framework for Sequential Decision Analytics

• Milind Tambe - AI & Multiagent Systems Research for Social Good

• Ralph Keeney - Value-focused Thinking and Decisions

• Eric Maskin - An Introduction to Mechanism Design

• David Kreps - Choice, Dynamic Choice, and Behavioral Economics

And here are a couple playlist on YouTube with lectures about topics in decision science:

• Gilad Feldman - Judgment and decision-making

• Frank Schilbach - MIT 14.13 Psychology and Economics

• Ben Polak - Game Theory

• Lei Zhang - Proseminar: Decision Neuroscience

• Ramesh Anbanandam - Decision making with spreadsheet

• Biswajit Mahanty - Selected Topics in Decision Modeling

A few good podcasts include:

• Subject To

• The Decision Education Podcast

• Freakonomics Radio

• Rationally Speaking

Some good general audience decision science related books are:

• Hammond, J. S., Keeney, R. L., & Raiffa, H. (2002). Smart choices: A practical guide to making better decisions. Harvard Business Review Press.

• Cialdini, R. B. (2006). Influence: The psychology of persuasion. HarperCollins Publishers.

• Levvit, S. J., & Dubner, S. D. (2006). Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. Penguin.

• Taleb, N.N. (2008). The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Penguine Books.

• Ariely, D. (2009). Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition. HarperCollings Publishers.

• Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2009). Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness. Penguin Books.

• Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Macmillan.

• Fisher, R., Ury, W. L., & Patton, B. (2011). Getting to yes: Negotiating agreement without giving in. Penguin.

• Haidt, J. (2013). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Vintage.

• Brockman, J. (2013). Thinking: The New Science of Decision-Making, Problem-Solving, and Prediction in Life and Markets. Harper Collins.

• Sunstein, C. R., & Hastie, R. (2015). Wiser: Getting beyond groupthink to make groups smarter. Harvard Business Press.

• Tetlock, P. E. (2016). Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. Crown.

• Christian, B., & Griffiths, T. (2016). Algorithms to live by: The computer science of human decisions. Macmillan.

• Davenport, T., & Harris, J. (2017). Competing on analytics: Updated, with a new introduction: The new science of winning. Harvard Business Press.

• Pearl, J., & Mackenzie, D. (2018). The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect. Basic Books.

• Winston, W.L. (2020). Analytics Stories: Using Data to Make Good Things Happen. Wiley.

• Kahneman, D., Sibony, O., & Sunstein, C. R. (2021). Noise: a flaw in human judgment. Hachette UK.

• Pinker, S. (2021). Rationality: What it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters. Penguin.

Decision science is a broad and multidisciplinary field. There are no introductions that cover all or even most of the central aspects of decision sciences. Here is a list of good textbooks that together cover many but not all of the important topics in decision sciences:

• Raiffa, H. (2007). Negotiation analysis: The science and art of collaborative decision making. Harvard University Press.

• French, S., Maule, J., & Papamichail, N. (2009). Decision behaviour, analysis and support. Cambridge University Press.

• Hastie, R., & Dawes, R. M. (2009). Rational choice in an uncertain world: The psychology of judgment and decision making. Sage Publications.

• Ackert, L., & Deaves, R. (2010). Behavioral Finance: Psychology, Decision Making and Markets. Cengage Learning.

• Glimcher, P. W. (2010). Foundations of neuroeconomic analysis. Oxford University Press.

• Just, D. R. (2013). Introduction to behavioral economics. Wiley Global Education.

• Harrington, J.E. (2014). Games, Strategies, and Decision Making. Freeman/Worth.

• Hiller, F. S., & Lieberman, G. J. (2020). Introductions To Operations Research. McGraw-Hill.

• Solomon, M. (2020). Consumer Behaviour: Buying, Having and Being. Pearson.

• Wang, Z. J., & Busemeyer, J. R. (2021). Cognitive choice modeling. MIT Press.

• Anderson, D. R., et al. (2024). Statistics for business and economics. Cengage Learning.

Some good decision science research handbooks include:

• Koehler, D. J., & Harvey, N. (Eds.). (2004). Blackwell handbook of judgment and decision making. John Wiley & Sons.

• Bouyssou, D., Pirlot, M., & Prade, H. (2009). Decision Making Process: Concepts and Methods. Wiley.

• Nutt, P. C., & Wilson, D. C. (Eds.). (2010). Handbook of decision making. John Wiley & Sons.

• Glimcher, P. W., & Fehr, E. (Eds.). (2013). Neuroeconomics: Decision making and the brain. Academic Press.

• Keren, G., & Wu, G. (Eds.). (2015). The Wiley-Blackwell handbook of judgment and decision making. Wiley-Blackwell.

• Sengupta, R. N., Gupta, A., & Dutta, J. (Eds.). (2016). Decision sciences: theory and practice. CRC Press.

• Greco, S., Ehrgott, M., Figueira, J.R., (Eds.) (2016). Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis: State of the Art Surveys. Springer.

• Altman, M. (Ed.). (2017). Handbook of behavioural economics and smart decision-making: Rational decision-making within the bounds of reason. Edward Elgar Publishing.

• Jansson-Boyd, C. V., & Zawisza, M. J. (Eds.). (2017). Routledge International Handbook of Consumer Psychology. Routledge

• Kilgour, D.M., Eden, C., (Eds.), (2020). Handbook of Group Decision and Negotiation. Springer.

Here are a few professional decision science associations:

• Society of Decision Professionals

• Decision Sciences Institute

• The Society for Judgment and Decision Making

• Decision Analysis Society