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Decision and Risk Analysis

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Strategic Management

Part of the book series: Classroom Companion: Business ((CCB))

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Abstract

Decision and risk analysis helps organizations make decisions to maximize their utility in the presence of risk and uncertainty. It helps them make a risk-informed decision. The entire approach to developing alternative scenarios and evaluating them using tools and methods of decision analysis has undergone highly practical improvements in the last few decades.

These improvements have largely to do with the need to engage senior decision-makers directly. For the larger organizations, the approach is to maximize expected value, balancing rewards, and costs with uncertainty. Medium and smaller organizations may be risk averse. This means that they have a non-linear utility function, usually emphasizing avoiding negative outcomes, and maximizing expected utility.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Author notes—It will take some time for AI users to truly understand the architecture of AI systems. As its name implies, AI system is not so good at helping us with data or information. It would be better if we used these mechanisms to improve our knowledge and intelligence. Wisdom is still the field of human reasoning. But the time will come when we deal with truly wise machines and that will raise us to a new level of things understanding.

  2. 2.

    Ver também: Leonard-Barton and Sensiper [5], que agregou à definição de Polanyi a seguinte frase: “We often know more than we realize” (Nós geralmente sabemos mais do que imaginamos).

  3. 3.

    John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) was an English economist and philosopher whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. Originally trained in mathematics, he built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles. One of the most influential economists of the twentieth century, he produced writings that are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics, and its various offshoots. His ideas, reformulated as New Keynesianism, are fundamental to mainstream macroeconomics.

  4. 4.

    David Gleicher was a management consultant working mostly with Fortune 500 companies. After he retired he devoted his time to working for social and economic justice.

  5. 5.

    Accountability—The obligation of persons or organizations to whom resources have been entrusted to assume the fiscal, managerial, and programmatic responsibilities conferred on them, and to inform society and those who have delegated these responsibilities about the fulfillment of objectives and goals and the performance achieved in the management of resources. It is also an obligation imposed on an audited person or organization to demonstrate that it has managed or controlled the resources entrusted to it in accordance with the terms under which they were entrusted to it.

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  1. Institute of Studies for Coopetitiviness (INSEC), São Paulo, SP, Brasil

    Arão Sapiro

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Correspondence to Arão Sapiro .

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Sapiro, A. (2024). Decision and Risk Analysis. In: Strategic Management. Classroom Companion: Business. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55669-2_7

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