Goals and Constraints in Decision-making^†

Abstract

Most problems in management involve multiple goals and two approaches to solving managerial problems have been suggested: optimizing and satisficing. The first covers methods of trade-offs, optimizing in tandem, conversion of goals into constraints and goal programming. The second mainly centres on norm setting and on interval programming. It is argued that cost-benefit analysis essentially belongs to the first group and that, contrary to some suggestions, the differences between the industrial and public sectors (as far as O.R. is concerned) are not related to differences between the optimizing and satisficing philosophies.