Suchergebnisse

In June 2002, the Israeli cabinet approved a plan to construct a continuous "security fence" separating much of the occupied West Bank of the Jordan River from Israel proper. The stated purpose of the barrier was to prevent Palestinian terrorists from entering Israel and killing Israeli civilians. Construction began in 2002, and a significant portion of the structure had been completed by early 2004. The current route of the wall deviates significantly from the "Green Line"—the 1949 armistice line that separates the West Bank from Israel. The fence frequently enters and traverses the West Bank, encircling Jewish settlements there. Eventually, about 15 percent of the territory of the West Bank, home to several hundred thousand Palestinians, will lie between the wall and the Green Line.

PurposeStudies of UK and US property investment markets have historically portrayed the decision‐making process as an exercise in rational analysis. This notion is fundamentally flawed as the concept of a perfect market has limited applicability to the real world context in which property investment decisions are taken. Investment decision‐making is neither clinical nor methodical but is undertaken by imperfect players in imperfect markets using imperfect information. The purpose of this paper is to explore the decision making processes of investors.Design/methodology/approachA normative‐behavioural framework incorporating heuristics is used, a technique whose application in property research has previously been limited to valuation. The empirical vehicle for the research was an exploration of the spatial dimension of office property investment in different European contexts.FindingsThe findings of in‐depth case studies of investment decision‐making in France, Germany and the UK indicate that the decision‐making process, as perceived by institutional investors, does not deviate significantly from normative models. However, investors tend to "collapse down" the decision‐making process, taking shortcuts to achieve (in some cases, predefined) investment outcomes. These short‐cuts potentially leave the decision‐making process open to the influence of bias, judgement and sentiment.Originality/valueThis study represents the first attempt to explore, empirically and in detail, the property investment decision‐making process.

Land-use change has transformed the majority of the terrestrial biosphere, impacting biodiversity, climate change, food production and provision of multiple ecosystem services. To improve our understanding of land-use change processes, the motivations and characteristics of land-use decision-makers need to be addressed more explicitly. Here, we systematically review the peer-reviewed literature between 1950 and 2018 that documents decision-making underlying land-use change processes. We found 315 publications reporting on 559 case studies worldwide that report on land-use decision-making in sufficient depth. In these cases, we identified 758 land-use decision-makers. We clustered decision-makers based on their objectives, attitudes and abilities into six distinct types: survivalist, subsistence-oriented smallholder, market-oriented smallholder, professional commercialist, professional intensifier and eco-agriculturalist. Survival and livelihood were identified as most common objectives for land-use decision makers, followed by economic objectives. We observe large differences in terms of decision-makers' attitudes towards environmental values, and particularly their financial status, while decision makers have a generally favorable attitude towards change and legislation. The majority of the documented decision-makers in the literature have only few abilities as they are poor and own small plots of land, while the wealthier decision-makers were identified to have more power and control over their decisions. Based on a representativeness analysis, we found that decision-making processes in marginal areas, such as mountainous regions, are overrepresented in existing case study evidence, while remote areas and lowlands are under-represented. These insights can help in the design of better land-use change assessments, as well as to improve policies towards sustainable land use.

From an organizational perspective, there are many decisions that are not strictly individual. A decision-making process may need to be distributed across multiple participants, each of whom contributes to the final decision by performing one or more tasks. A participant may be a person, a group, a team, or an artifact such as a computerized decision-support system. Computers are routinely used to support individual decision making. However, their potential for supporting distributed decision making is only beginning to be actualized. Further progress in exploring and realizing this potential can benefit greatly from a formal model that accounts for the diverse phenomena that can occur within a distributed decision maker. When considering computer-based support for distributed decision making, the issue of coordinating the multiple participants becomes the central concern. Coordination defines the structural and dynamic patterns of inter-participant relationships in an organization. It has several aspects including planning, control, and review. Planning involves task decomposition, subtask allocation and synthesis. Control indicates mediation, negotiation and execution. And review deals with performance evaluation which will then contribute to organizational learning. Moreover, coordination occurs in a context of concurrent problem-solving tasks where multiple decisions are pending simultaneously. Bits and pieces of these coordination facets have been somewhat supported by existing computer technologies, such as decision-support systems and computer-mediated communication systems. However, systematic study of such support possibilities depends on formal models of distributed decision making as organizing paradigms. In this paper, we present a model of distributed decision making that is particularly concerned with the ongoing coordination among participants in multiple simultaneously active decision processes. Basic outlines of the model are presented as an initial foundation for understanding the possibilities of computer-based support for distributed decision making. The model takes the view that an organization is dynamic in terms of its capacity for improved coordination over time and through experience. It accommodates a bidding perspective as the context for coordination. The use and adjustment of entity reputation offers a means for improved coordination over time, and for capturing the phenomenon of organizational learning.

Previous studies point to a range of factors as influencing managerial decision‐making processes. There are four major trends with regard to the studies. They are environmental antecedents, organisational antecedents, decision‐specific antecedents and individual managerial characteristics. While the majority of literature has chosen to focus in a specialised way on the influence of unidimensional variables there are a number of studies advocating the study of multiple dimensions simultaneously. This paper examines the findings from a qualitative research methodology, convergent interviewing, focussing on the impact of environmental, organisational, decision‐specific and individual characteristics, in combination with environmental and organisational characteristics on managerial decisions. Information from managers suggested decision‐specific and individual characteristics in combination with environmental and organisational characteristics, were highly relevant to the process of decision making. For all managers, managerial years of experience and the complexity and politicality of decision content were indicated as an important preconditions for determining the nature of managerial decision making. Furthermore, environmental and organisational factors such as environmentally determined time constraints (e.g. government policy) and staff conflict were important issues influencing managers' decisions. A number of multidimensional interactions were posited from the findings. Implications for future research are discussed.