DECISION MAKING, HABITUAL DOMAINS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss how information technology (IT) affects and influences people to make decisions. We first introduce human behavior mechanism and habitual domains — the software that drive the behaviors. Then we discuss the impacts of IT on decision elements and environment, and then IT's impacts on a variety of decision problems including routine problems, mixed routine problems, fuzzy problems and challenging problems. IT is useful in solving routine problems but not as obvious in solving fuzzy and challenging problems. To solve fuzzy and challenging problems, an effective concept and model of competence set analysis is introduced. Finally, we describe three types of competence set analysis and show how IT can help in these three types of problems.