Modeling rationality, morality, and evolution - Peter Danielson. Theory of Games as a Tool for the Moral Philosopher. An Inaugural Lecture Delivered in Cambridge on 2 December 1954 Online Book at Questia Online Library. Ethical Decision Making Processes. Five Tips for Making Better Decisions. Being able to pull the trigger is one of the benefits of being your own boss, but some entrepreneurs are still gun shy.
Making a decision is one of the most powerful acts for inspiring confidence in leaders and managers. Yet many bosses are squeamish about it. Some decide not to decide, while others simply procrastinate. Either way, it’s typically a cop-out -- and doesn’t exactly encourage inspiration in the ranks. Avoid the human temptation of focusing too much on avoiding the downside. I’m halfway through a book called Nudge which is about the shortcuts we all employ to be able to make decisions quickly without needing to understand all the details.
As the authors point out, as the world gets more complicated and the pace of change accelerates our need to rely on these shortcuts is increasing. Their interest is in understanding how those shortcuts work and in using that knowledge to help people (i.e. nudge people) to make better decisions – e.g. in the way we save for our retirement. One of the most common shortcuts we rely on are the default options that are presented to us, and hence thinking carefully about which options are chosen as the defaults is a powerful way to ‘nudge’. Like all shortcuts loss aversion has solid rational roots. In most scenarios in life keeping what we have is much easier than getting replacements – but in a pure business sense this level of loss aversion is clearly not rational.