Knowledge that Transforms

When making decisions, managers like to obtain pertinent information quickly and accurately from the information systems in an organization. But, often, different answers are obtained, depending on how the information request is phrased or from which information system the information is requested. In order to correct this problem, the system analyst and data base administrator have to resolve any conflicts in defining elements, their names and their relationships before computerized information systems are designed. A syntax method, described in this paper, has been developed to handle this process. This method standardizes names and mathematical relationships of elements. These standard data elements become the input to most system analysis methods facilitating the design of computerized information systems.

In a December 1983 article in Management Science, Stephen Goddard studies the problem of ranking contestants in a round-robin tournament. He gives objections to the usual method of ranking contestants by number of victories and proposes both an alternative method for ranking contestants and a criterion for determining the “fairest” ranking. We argue here that his criterion is faulty and, in fact, falls prey to his own objections. We also show that his method, in any event, produces rankings which don't satisfy the criterion. Finally we describe a general class of models of competition which have been proposed to solve this problem and which lead to the usual method of ranking by number of victories.

Decomposable systems, decomposition and 0-1 integer programming techniques are reviewed relative to project selection problems. It is concluded that a heuristic procedure is a suitable way to handle such problems in organizational settings. A hierarchical multiperiod multidimensional model is proposed. Good results are obtained based on an existing heuristic algorithm by Toyoda, by means of a decomposable interactive formulation. Examples and discussions are included that show how the use of this model can improve management decisions. A major advantage of this formulation is its flexibility to handle many different R&D situations, a feature which should increase its usefulness over many other R&D Project Selection Models. The model can be used in a multihierarchy ambience, can use parametric budgeting, and can be used as a control tool. The interactive feature provides the means for improving organizational communications and integrating divergent viewpoints.

In many service systems, customers interact with an agent who directs customers to specific service facilities. Each agent, as a decision maker, seeks to allocate his/her customers to the service centers so as to optimize a measure of performance based on the customers’ expected waiting time and the expected number of customers in service. In this paper, the problem of multiple agents, each optimizing his/her customer allocation decision in a stochastic service system, is analyzed as a noncooperative game. It is shown that an equilibrium point to such a game exists and sufficient conditions for which this equilibrium point is unique are also given. Finally, the relative efficiency of the multi-agent system is examined by comparing the customers’ average waiting time in the multi-agent system to the one-agent case. It is shown that, in general, the multi-agent system is not as efficient as the one-agent one in terms of customer welfare.

This paper is a review and evaluation of a policy argument in a recent issue of Management Science. Mitroff, Mason and Barabba presented a case study of a policy model, built around the problem of undercounting minorities in the U.S. Census, in a Toulmin format. We restructure this model as a Boolean system with both conditional and unconditional statements, preserving both the MMB arguments and the Toulmin format. It is shown that there is an error in the buildup of the MMB model. This error does not change the end result that their model is a contradiction, however it is much earlier to see this fact with the Boolean formulation than with a verbal presentation only. We discuss the potential usefulness of this type of modelling for policy capture, including some of the difficulties of employing the Toulmin format.

This paper examines the relationship between research and development peoples' perceptions of uncertainty in their firm's competitive environment and their patterns of technical communication. Measures of both these attributes of six R&D groups, two in each of three industries, are reported and analyzed here. Technical people who saw the world (competitors, suppliers, customers, technology and regulations) outside their firm as more uncertain also were found to seek greater contact with sources of information outside their firms. The gatekeeper phenomenon was found to be more pronounced, but less formal and less well defined in these firms. Gatekeepers in general were found to perceive a higher level of uncertainty than others in all six firms.

For an arbitrator model different from the one in the referenced paper, final-offer arbitration (FOA) is very effective. This suggests that strategies for conducting successful FOA may be available to arbitrators. In the above quoted paper, Brams and Merrill (Brams, Steven J., Samuel Merrill, III. 1983. Equilibrium strategies for final-offer arbitration: there is no median convergence. Management Sci. 29 (August) 927–941.) quote a statement on final-offer arbitration (FOA): “The theory which underlies final-offer arbitration is quite simple. If the arbitrator or panel was permitted to select only one or the other of the parties' final offers, with no power to make a choice anywhere in between, it was expected that the logic of the procedure would force negotiating parties to continue moving closer together in search of a position that would be most likely to receive neutral sympathy. Ultimately, so the argument went, they would come so close together that they would almost inevitably find their own settlement.” and then refute it as follows: “One purpose of our article is to show that there is little truth to this theory: divergence, rather than convergence, of equilibrium strategies is the norm.”

Research on decision-making behavior has shown that decision strategies used by individuals are contingent upon the characteristics of the task. For example, as the task size (i.e., the number of alternatives and/or the number of dimensions describing each alternative) increases, individuals tend to quickly eliminate alternatives that do not meet a criterion level for any dimension (i.e., they adopt a noncompensatory decision strategy, in which a high value on one dimension cannot offset or compensate for a low value on another dimension). Most of this research has involved consumers making buying decisions. The purpose of the research reported here was to determine if contingent decision behavior extends to experts (experienced bank loan officers) making business decisions (loan decisions). In this study two task characteristics (task size, and similarity of loan profiles describing alternatives) were varied in a bank loan decision context. Two process tracing methods (information boards and think-aloud verbal protocol analysis) were used to obtain evidence of how eleven bank loan officers made choices among alternative loan candidates. Of particular interest was the effect that changes in task characteristics had on loan officers' decision strategies. The results indicated that when faced with tasks of increasing size, loan officers adapted their behavior in a manner consistent with an increased use of noncompensatory decision strategies. In contrast, when the loan profiles of candidate companies were similar loan officers exhibited an increased use of compensatory strategies. It was also found that when both the task size and similarity of alternatives were varied loan officers adapted their behavior as if they processed these characteristics serially. These results indicate that contingent behavior associated with the two types of task characteristics may be quite different. A priori, there was reason to believe that expert loan officers would not exhibit contingent decision behavior. The fact that their decision strategies were contingent upon task characteristics has important implications for managerial practice and research. First, the results have design implications for information and decision support systems for lending institutions. Second, future research should investigate the consequences of serial processing of task characteristics.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze personnel rotation in the Navy. Although primarily a sea-going force, the Navy must periodically rotate personnel to shore duty. The effective administration of this policy promotes morale and reduces attrition. It also enables managers to control the distribution of personnel, so that programmed changes in force manning levels can be implemented gradually without disrupting individual career development. In order to accomplish this, however, Navy planners must understand the effect alterations in individual parameters will have on the system. A simplified mathematical model is developed and analyzed to help clarify these interrelationships. The results of this analysis are applied to answer some important questions concerning the present enlisted force.

A stochastic PERT network is a directed acyclic network in which the arc lengths are independent random variables with known distributions. A fundamental problem in PERT networks is to identify the activities which are critical to the achievement of the project objectives. In an activity network if the duration of each activity is not a random variable, then it is easy to identify the criticality of each activity represented by its float time. However, when the duration of any activity is a random variable, it is not easy to identify the criticality of each activity. In this case the criticality of an activity is known as the “criticality index,” which is defined as the sum of the criticality indices of the paths containing it. The criticality index of a path is the probability that the duration of the path is greater than or equal to the duration of every other path in the network. Clearly, the criticality index of an activity can be obtained by determining the criticality indices of the paths, which requires identifying all the paths, determining their criticality indices, then identifying the paths containing the activity. In this paper we develop a theory which leads to a procedure to approximate the criticality indices of all the activities without going through the above three steps. The procedure has been applied to large size PERT networks generated at random, and the results are found to be very close to those obtained by extensive Monte Carlo sampling.