A Study of the Relationship Between Decision Maker's Education and Experience and Alternative Choice in Trade Off Decisions.

The importance of decision making to organizational existence has provided ample justification for many forms of research into the complex decision process. The decision making process in modern, large organizations draws inputs from and provides outputs to many smaller internal decision units. Incompatible or conflicting inputs and outputs may result in wasteful suboptimizations. In this research, one possible underlying cause of such conflicting inputs and outputs was investigated. That possible cause was the existence of differences in decision makers formal education and work experience backgrounds. A decision making experiment was conducted to obtain information bearing on relationships between choice of alternatives and education background, work experience background, and the decision makers prescribed role.