decision-making
The choice of one particular strategy to achieve some end. Human geographers have studied decision-making in the context of industrial location, residential choice, migration, response to environmental hazards, and shopping behaviour, and have used two major concepts: movement minimization and place utility.
In the earliest models of decision-making, economic man was seen as the decision-maker, but this concept has generally been replaced by that of the satisficer who is not blessed with perfect knowledge, who works with bounded rationality, who seeks only a satisfactory solution, and is therefore sub-optimal. This may be illustrated for the location of businesses by the use of spatial margins to profitability; the decision-maker is free to locate within the margins, although not necessarily at the optimal location. This approach narrows the choice, but does not point to the actual location to be selected. Decision-making is of great interest to behavioural geographers, who express the variety of incoming information and the range of the individual's abilities to use that information in a behavioural matrix (A. Pred, 1967, 1969).
A theoretical basis to decision-making has been attempted with reference to risk, uncertainty, and game theory, but with limited success, since each decision is made within its own, situated, context. More successful generalizations have been based on case-studies. These may show a stimulus such as higher demand for a product. The response of the industrialist may be to expand. From this decision comes the need for an extended site or a new plant. This location decision then demands a host of smaller decisions, and experiencing the results of the decision will then lead to feedback which may affect future decisions. The case-study approach also uncovered the importance of personal factors, which are difficult to build into a theoretical model.
Much of the work on decision-making has been unsatisfactory because it has been based on the crude idea that humans act in mechanistic response to stimuli, and new research is moving to qualitative investigations based on the meanings people give to different aspects of their lives; for example, the decision to travel to a facility, such as a shopping centre, can depend on the significance of shopping to the individual—a chore to be got over with quickly?—a pleasure?—a day out for the family? as well as on an individual's culture and past experience. These may matter as much as, if not more than, movement-minimization.
