Frameworks For Modeling Cognition And Decisions In Institutional Environments

This book deals with the theoretical, methodological, and empirical implications of bounded rationality in the operation of institutions. It focuses on decisions made under uncertainty, and presents a reliable strategy of knowledge acquisition for the design and implementation of decision-support systems. Based on the distinction between the inner and outer environment of decisions, the book explores both the cognitive mechanisms at work when actors decide, and the institutional mechanisms existing among and within organizations that make decisions fairly predictable. While a great deal of work has been done on how organizations act as patterns of events for (boundedly) rational decisions, less effort has been devoted to study under which circumstances organizations cease to act as such reliable mechanisms. Through an empirical strategy on open-ended response data from a survey among junior judges, the work pursues two main goals. The first one is to explore the limits of “institutional rationality” of the Spanish lower courts on-call service, an optimal scenario to observe decision-making under uncertainty. The second aim is to achieve a better understanding of the kind of uncertainty under which inexperienced decision-makers work. This entails exploring the demands imposed by problems and the knowledge needed to deal with them, making this book also a study on expertise achievement in institutional environments. This book combines standard multivariate statistical methods with machine learning techniques such as multidimensional scaling and topic models, treating text as data. Doing so, the book contributes to the collaboration between empirical social scientific approaches and the community of scientists that provide the set of tools and methods to make sense of the fastest growing resource of our time: data.

This book offers an exciting new collection of recent research on the actual processes that humans use when making decisions in their everyday lives and in business situations. The contributors use cognitive psychological techniques to break down the constituent processes and set them in their social context. The contributors are from many different countries and draw upon a wide range of techniques, making this book a valuable resource to cognitive psychologists in applied settings, economists and managers.

This book focuses on negotiation processes and how negotiation modeling frameworks and information technology can support these. A modeling framework for negotiation as a purposeful complex adaptive process is presented and computer-implemented in the first three chapters. Two game-theoretic contributions use non-cooperative games in extensive form and a computer-implemented graph model for conflict resolution, respectively. Two chapters use the negotiators' joint utility distribution to provide problem structure and computer support. A chapter on cognitive support uses restructurable modeling as a framework. One chapter matches information technologies with negotiation tasks. Another develops computer support based on preference programming. Two final chapters develop a stakeholder approach to support system evaluation, and a research framework for them, respectively. Negotiation Processes: Modeling Frameworks and Information Technology will be of interest to researchers and students in the areas of negotiation, group decision/negotiation support systems and management science, as well as to practising negotiators interested in this technology.

This work explores the difficulties of solving contemporary environmental problems within existing global institutions. It questions guidelines set out in recent influential policy reports, and suggests new agendas for sustainability, industrial ecology, and institutional reform. Including case studies from the USA, Europe and China, this book investigates a wide range of environmental problems presently confronting experts worldwide.

This collection reflects emerging research on the cognitive dimensions of business models and business model innovation. Numerous scholars have over the past decade point to the promise of cognition theories to clarify business models. This collection takes stock and provide examples of new developments.

The complexity of the decisions that today’s higher education leaders face—as they engage with a diversifying student body, globalization and technological advances—requires embracing new ways of thinking about leadership. This book examines the new theories and concepts of leadership that are described in the multidisciplinary literature on leadership, and are being applied in other sectors—from government to the non-profit and business communities—to explore the implications for leaders and leadership programs in higher education. At a time when the heroic, controlling, and distant leader of the past has given way to a focus on teams, collectives and social change, the contributors to this book ask: What new skills and competencies should leaders and programs be addressing?The recognition of the interdependence of groups within organizations, and between organizations; of cultural and social differences; and of how technology has sped up decision time and connected people across the globe; have changed the nature of leadership as well as made the process more complex and diffuse. This book is addressed to anyone developing institutional, regional or national leadership development programs; to aspiring leaders planning to participate in such programs; and to campus leaders concerned with the development and pipeline of emerging leaders. It will be particularly useful for administrators in faculty development offices who are planning and creating workshops in leadership training, and for staff in human resource offices who offer similar training.Contributors: Laurel Beesemyer; Rozana Carducci; Pamela Eddy; Tricia Bertram Gallant; Lynn Gangone; Cheryl Getz; Jeni Hart; Jerlando F. L. Jackson; Lara Jaime; Adrianna Kezar; Bridget R. McCurtis; Sharon McDade; Robert J. Nash; Elizabeth M. O’Callahan; Sue V. Rosser; Lara Scott.

Designing Interventions' brings together theory-based tools developed in behavioural science to understand and change behaviour to form a step-by-step intervention design manual. This book is for anyone with an interest in changing behaviour regardless of whether they have a background in behavioural science.

The Cognitive Basis of Institutions: A Synthesis of Behavioral and Institutional Economics synthesizes modern research in behavioral economics with traditional institutional economics. This work emphasizes that institution and agent are inextricably linked, and that both cognitive and institutional processes coalesce to influence human decision-making. It integrates cognition and institution through the behavioral economics theoretical lens of bounded rationality. Methodologically, it develops game-theoretical, complexity and neuroeconomic solutions to unite study of the two areas. The work concludes by proposing general implications for the economic study of decisions using the cognitive-institutional approach, also providing specific recommendations for public policy. Reveals how institutional structures and individual actions interact and coevolve cognitively Connects individual decision-making, decision-making processes and institutional formation Unites our understanding of cooperative ‘prosocial’ behavior with the institutional dynamics that may create it Discusses the implications of the behavioral-institutional paradigm for paternalism and libertarianism in public policy