Distributed decision making (DDM) has become of increasing importance in quantitative decision analysis. In applications like supply chain management, service operations, or managerial accounting, DDM has led to a paradigm shift. The book provides a unified approach to such seemingly diverse fields as multi-level stochastic programming, hierarchical production planning, principal agent theory, negotiations or contract theory. Different settings like multi-level one-person decision problems, multi-person antagonistic planning, and leadership situations are covered. Numerous examples and real-life planning cases illustrate the concepts. The new edition has been considerably expanded by additional chapters on supply chain management, service operations and multi-agent systems.

Frequently (and often inappropriately) decision making in the work environment has been analyzed and modeled in terms of isolated decisions made by one person. In reality, decision making is a continuous, interpersonal process usually involving several ``decision makers'' aiming at dynamic and cooperative control of the state of affairs at work. Based on original contributions from researchers and research teams, this book provides an urgently needed cognitive approach to models of distributed decision making, exploring the basis for design of decision support systems in various complex, collective, modern work environments. It identifies the state of the art of modeling distributed decision making and the problems imposed by modern high-tech systems. A also formulates promising research avenues.

Explores decision making in organizations, highlighting the roles of incentive, conflict, power and politics.

"In this book, the authors focus on the development of new approaches to the management of information, addressing several topics i.e. information evaluation and ecology of information, agent technology for information management, ethics of information, infological interpretation of information in distributed business environment, and business models in information economy"--Provided by publisher.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 21st International Workshop on Multi-Agent-Based Simulation, MABS 2021, held in May 2021 as part of AAMAS 2021. The conference was held virtually due to COVID 19 pandemic. The 14 revised full papers included in this volume were carefully selected from 23 submissions. The workshop focused on finding efficient solutions to model complex social systems, in such areas as economics, management, organizational and social sciences in general. In all these areas, agent theories, metaphors, models, analysis, experimental designs, empirical studies, and methodological principles, all converge into simulation as a way of achieving explanations and predictions, exploration and testing of hypotheses, better designs and systems and providing decision-support in a wide range of applications.

This book provides an introductory treatment of the fundamentals of decision-making in a distributed framework. Classical detection theory assumes that complete observations are available at a central processor for decision-making. More recently, many applications have been identified in which observations are processed in a distributed manner and decisions are made at the distributed processors, or processed data (compressed observations) are conveyed to a fusion center that makes the global decision. Conventional detection theory has been extended so that it can deal with such distributed detection problems. A unified treatment of recent advances in this new branch of statistical decision theory is presented. Distributed detection under different formulations and for a variety of detection network topologies is discussed. This material is not available in any other book and has appeared relatively recently in technical journals. The level of presentation is such that the hook can be used as a graduate-level textbook. Numerous examples are presented throughout the book. It is assumed that the reader has been exposed to detection theory. The book will also serve as a useful reference for practicing engineers and researchers. I have actively pursued research on distributed detection and data fusion over the last decade, which ultimately interested me in writing this book. Many individuals have played a key role in the completion of this book.

Decision making in today's organizations is often distributed widely and usually supported by such technologies as satellite communications, electronic messaging, teleconferencing, and shared data bases. Distributed Decision Making outlines the process and problems involved in dispersed decision making, draws on current academic and case history information, and highlights the need for better theories, improved research methods and more interdisciplinary studies on the individual and organizational issues associated with distributed decision making. An appendix provides additional background reading on this socially and economically important problem area.