Quantity of choices and quality of decision making
In order to know what influences the quality of decisions, the study asked the same management team eight years later about the quality of 83 management decisions made in a year and a half in a company with 1,380 employees.
The number of choices was 2 to 4. 4 was a small sample size, so the main comparison was "how different is it between 2 and 3 choices".
Judgments are rated in three categories: "very good", "satisfactory", and "poor". (a,b,c below) When there were three options, (a + b) / c was 7.7 times higher and a / (b + c) was 16.7 times higher than when there were two options.
digression
- We also examined the quantity of questions asked during the discussion and the quality of the decisions made, but did not find significant differences
- The authors believe that "more options may not be better" because the quality of decisions in the case of four options was lower. This could be due to the fact that all decisions with four options were high-complexity problems. Since there are only four data sets, it is not possible to make a statistical judgment.
- I have not followed up on Problem Complexity because I am not interested in it, although I have heard that the same authors have written about it in detail in another paper.
GEMUNDEN and HAUSCHILDT (1985) "Number of alternatives and efficiency in different types of top-management decisions" European Journal of Operational Research 22 (1985) 178-190
orthographical variants - Number of options and quality of decision making # Number of options # Quality of decision making
This page is auto-translated from /nishio/選択肢の量と意思決定の質 using DeepL. If you looks something interesting but the auto-translated English is not good enough to understand it, feel free to let me know at @nishio_en. I'm very happy to spread my thought to non-Japanese readers.