Lecture 1
4-4-2022
Decision making with uncertainty about the result. How does this work?
2 options, do you switch or not? And with regards to being correct the first time or not.
At first, you have a 1/3 chance to get the right door. After your first choice, you get a 2/3
probability of getting the right door. It is thus better to switch since you then get a higher
probability.
What is quantitative decision making?
We provide students with the methods and tools to make better, more responsible, decisions in a
complex and dynamic world!
What makes a decision dif cult?
- A lot of options
- Contradicting objectives
- Uncertainty about the outcome
What makes a good decision?
- Criteria to evaluate the outcome
- Criteria to evaluate the process
—> Outcome bias: a bias in which people evaluate the quality of a decision solely based on the
outcome.
Management/leadership = making decisions
Newsvendor problem
Cost if you have too much, cost if you have too little (newspaper boy or airline company example)
Decision problem: structure
1. Possible decisions
2. Possible scenarios
3. Decision table = evaluation of possible decisions in different future scenarios
Example
Possible decisions:
- 1 flight (200(
- 2 flights (400)
Parameters:
$100 cost per seat
$200 ticket price
$80 penalty lost sales
Use this all to put in a decision table.
Quantitative decision making 2021-2022
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How many seats will we sell when we have a capacity of 200 and a demand of 300?
You cant sell more than your capacity and you cant sell more than the demand.
Thus, Sales= MIN(capacity, demand)
If demand> capacity, then out-of-stock = demand - capacity
But out-of-stock cannot be lower than 0!
Thus, MAX(Demand-capacity,0)
Sales - cost - out of stock (formula to use in decision table)
Three decision types
Type 1: under certainty (knows everything about outcomes)
Type 2: under uncertainty (knows nothing about outcomes)
Type 3: under risk (know probability distribution)
Watch out for the difference in for example sales/costs (is it a maximization problem or
minimization problem?)
- For each decision, determine the best outcome (max)
- Select the decision with the best outcome (max)
2. Maximin (worst-case)
A different decision in the end than maximax
3. Hurwicz criterion (weighted average between optimism and pessimism)
- select a coefficient A between 0 and 1
- 1 = 100% optimistic
- 0= 100% pessimistic
Which alfa do you select? The degree to which you are optimistic
4. Laplace criterion (equally likely)
Average of all possible outcomes
5. Minimax regret
Opportunity loss or regret = difference between the actual outcome and the best possible
outcome
The maximax criterion is a special case of the Hurwicz criterion (with alfa 1)
Quantitative decision making 2021-2022
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