Engineering Commons^™

Group Decision-Making, Edward Cook

Theses and Dissertations

The present work explores improvements in group decision-making. It begins with a practical example using state-of-the-art techniques for a complex, high-risk decision. We show how these techniques can reveal a better alternative. Although we created an improved decision process, decision-makers were apt to protect their own organizations instead of the project. This tendency was reduced over the course of the decision-making process but inspired the first conceptual component of this work.

The first concept describes the “Cost of Conflict” that can arise in a group decision, using game theory to represent the non-cooperative approach and comparing the outcome to the …