Decision Theory Quotes

The classical theory of omniscient rationality is strikingly simple and beautiful.

When we deliberate it is about means and not ends.

There are no answers, only choices.

If fighting is sure to result in victory, then you must fight.

Early in my doctoral training at Cornell University, I became immersed in the behavioral decision theory paradigm.

All change is nothing but a decision. All decisions are controlled by what we link to pain and pleasure.

I have not been able in one lecture even to scratch the surface of the role of maximum principles in analytic economics.

When there aren't any smart decisions, I suppose you just have to pick the stupid decision you like best.

The best practical advice then is: try to maximize your expected payoff, which is the sum of all payoffs multiplied by probabilities.

In any decision for action, when you have to make up your mind what to do, there is always a 'should' involved, and this cannot be worked out from, 'If I do this, what will happen?' alone.

Either in or out of time, the decision of a personal agency to commit an action happens antecedent to the action itself. Even if the deciding and the acting happened simultaneously, it would still not be true that the acting was antecedent to the deciding. Imagine God saying, "Oh, look! I just created a universe. Now I'd better decide to do it.

Making decisions is probably the most important thing people ever do. Nothing happens until someone makes a decision.

It is not necessary to have an entire certainty in regard to considerable goods and evils; mere possibility, and much more so probability, is sufficient to induce a reasonable person to deprive himself of some trifling good, and even to suffer some slight evil, with a design of acquiring a far greater good, and avoiding a more troublesome evil.

My research career has been devoted to understanding human decision-making and problem-solving processes. The pursuit of this goal has led me into the fields of political science, economics, cognitive psychology, computer science and philosophy of science, among others.

Managers are already voracious consumers of theory. Every time they make a decision or take action, it's based on some theory that leads them to believe that action will lead to the right result. The problem is, most managers aren't aware of the theories they're using, and they often use the wrong theories for the situation.

I tried to develop some theories that took account of the uncertainty in the world and the complexity in the world.

I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.

I like to think that since I was about 19, I have studied human decision-making and problem-solving.

That economic decisions are made without certain knowledge of the consequences is pretty self-evident. But, although many economists were aware of this elementary fact, there was no systematic analysis of economic uncertainty until about 1950.

In 1989, I was awarded the Von Neumann Prize in Operations Research Theory by the Operations Research Society of America and The Institute of Management Sciences. They cited my works in the areas of portfolio theory, sparse matrix techniques and the SIMSCRIPT programming language.

We don't know the probabilities of future events. Still, you have to take action, and so you do it on gut feeling. That's the world we live in.

Decisions are always made with insufficient information. If you really knew what was going on, the decision would make itself.

All decisions are made on insufficient evidence.

I mean we know that some choice makes you better off than no choice. Now do we get better off if we go from a lot of choice versus a few choices? And there I think the answer is much, much, much more complicated.