Suchergebnisse

Intended to provide the person who is new to the field of consulting with a guide to building professional relationships with clients, this article covers some of the main factors that govern the relationship, highlights potential pitfalls, and offers advice. Included is advice on how firm size affects the client relationship, how the specific consulting service affects the relationship, how a consultant goes about getting clients, and how relationships are built. Also included is the description of a typical consulting project and references to descriptions of other consulting projects. The advice is based on firsthand experiences and observations from 25 years as a consultant to government and business.

ABSTRACTThis paper formulates and analyzes models of two‐party bargaining behavior where each side possesses private information about its preferences that is unavailable to the other. We examine the strategic behavior that bargainers might exhibit when disclosing information either to an arbitrator or to each other. Our results show that when bargaining is over one issue, it is relatively uncomplicated analytically to calculate the optimal strategy, but, despite this, even sophisticated bargainers tend to make wrong assumptions about the behavior of others and to use strategies that are far from optimal. When the bargaining encompasses several factors, computation of optimal strategies becomes very cumbersome and the use of an optimal strategy does not gain a bargainer much over what he could have achieved with truthful revelation. Thus, in theory, truthful revelation is not the best course of action to adopt for a bargainer interested in maximizing individual gain, but in practice the alternatives may involve mistaken assumptions about the behavior of others and may therefore turn out to be inferior to truthful revelation.

An approach to communicating decision and risk analysis findings to managers is illustrated in a real case context. This article consists essentially of a report prepared for senior managers of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to help them make a reactor safety decision. It illustrates the communication of decision analysis findings relating to technical risks, costs, and benefits in support of a major risk management decision: whether or not to require a safety backfit. Its focus is on the needs of decision makers, and it introduces some novel communication devices.

ABSTRACTThis report presents an application of quantitative decision‐analytic techniques to consider an opportunity for capital investment in a new product.Decision analysis is a well‐established technique for evaluating major decisions in which substantial resources and time are available for the analysis and the problem is definitely formulated at the outset. This case study, however, illustrates how decision‐analytic techniques can be used on‐line to improve decision making in a situation in which time and resources are limited, and the manager's perception of the problem changes in response to feedback from the analysis.The basic decision problem was whether or not the AIL division of Cutler‐Hammer, Incorporated should purchase a six‐month option on a flight‐safety system patent. The president of AIL had only a few weeks in which to make a decision.The analytic approach focused on a probabilistic discounted earnings model. This model was refined over a two‐week period through a sequence of iterations which incorporated the results of both direct and indirect assessments of probabilities and values.The analysis affected the company's decision process by providing a vehicle for structuring the ongoing communication between AIL's president and his advisors, and by focusing their attention on the most important issues. In the end, the analysis facilitated a unanimous decision from the decision‐making group not to purchase the option, but to consider participating in the license as a subcontractor at a later date. This strategy had not been considered at the outset.