The decision to launch a space shuttle is an example of a decision that is made in a distributed decision making environment. Distributed decision making (DDM) typically refers to decision making when the decision makers or the information are distributed across information processing centers. A decision maker may be a group of humans, a single human, or a basic transaction (piece of a computer program). The concern of this proposal is with DDM environments where the decision makers are humans organized hierarchically and dispersed across information processing centers that may or may not be geographically separate. Most work on human decision making has been concerned with the behavior of individual decision makers. It is quite clear that it is unrealistic to lump together identical people into an "economic man" or "ideal decision maker". Such models tend to make erroneous predictions vis-a-vis group decision making. Consequently, what is needed is a way of aggregating individual models that does not violate the constraints placed on individual decision making due to the fact that are involved in a distributed decision making enterprise. There is a need for a model of the human decision maker in a DDM environment. Such a model would decrease reliance on expensive field exercises and war and organizational games where parameters affecting decision errors are difficult to control. Further, such a model would enable researchers to make predictions about human decision making behavior in distributed environments which could then be empirically tested.
