Kazuhisa Takemura - Escaping from Bad Decisions A Behavioral Decision-Theoretic Perspective.

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Kazuhisa Takemura

Department of Psychology & Center for Decision Research, Waseda University

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Kazuhisa Takemura is a Japanese psychologist and educator. Besides serving as a professor at the Department of Psychology, Waseda University, he is also the director of the Universitys Center for Decision Research, a professor at the Waseda MBA school, and a research fellow at the Waseda Research Institute for Science and Engineering.

He received his BA and MA degrees from the Department of Psychology, Doshisha University, in 1983 and 1985, and received his PhD (System Science) from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1994, and an additional PhD (Medical Science) from Kitasato University in 2013.

He has also worked abroad as a visiting researcher at James Cook University, La Trobe University, and Australian National University (Australia); the Tinbergen Institute (the Netherlands); Gothenburg University and Stockholm University (Sweden); the University of Konstanz (Germany); and National Cheng Kung University (Taiwan). He was also a Fulbright Senior Researcher at the Department of Social and Decision Science, Carnegie Mellon University (USA) from 1999 to 2000, and a visiting professor at the Department of Psychology, St. Petersburg State University (Russia) in 2008, at Venice International University (Italy) in 2015.

His main research area is human judgment and decision-making, especially the mathematical modeling of preferential judgment and choice. He received a Hayashi Award (Distinguished Scholar) from the Behaviormetric Society (in 2002), an Excellent Paper Award from Japan Society of Kansei Engineering in 2003, Book Awards from the Japanese Society of Social Psychology (in 2010) and the Behaviormetric Society (in 2016), a Fellow Award from the International Association of Applied Psychology (in 2018), and Kimura Award, Transdisciplinary Federation of Science and Technology (in 2021).

In the course of his career, he has taught extensively on behavioral decision theory at many universities (Waseda University, Tokyo University, Osaka University, University of Tsukuba, Kobe University, Nagoya University, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Gakushuin University, Rikkyo University, Tokyo International University, Kitasato University, Venice International University, St. Petersburg State University, and National Cheng Kung University).

Bad decisions are made even in serious situations such as selecting a personal career or selecting an important policy in management and politics. In this book, I will first introduce the conceptual and mathematical frameworks for decision theory and multi-attribute decision-making theory and give the formal definitions of the worst decision, the best decision, and bad decision. I will explain from a theoretical point of view why it is difficult for many people to escape from the bad decision. I will then give some examples of bad decisions that were determined as bad decisions in experimental studies in both individual and group settings. In experimental studies, people tended to make bad decisions even in fatal situations if they focused on the trivial aspects of a problem. Interestingly, bad decisions are not very related to educational background. In addition to providing a psychological model of bad decisions in multi-attribute situations, I offer some suggestions based on empirical research and computer simulation studies on how to avoid making bad decisions.

This book also provides an overview of the idea of bad decisions from behavioral and mathematical perspectives and related theoretical and empirical findings. Behavioral decision theory is described briefly as the general term for descriptive theories to explain the psychological processes. As the studies of G. H. A. Simon who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1978, D. Kahneman, and R. Thaler who won the prize in 2002 and 2017, respectively, suggest, the psychological methodology and knowledge of decision study have been applied widely in such fields as economics, business administration, and engineering, and are expected to become useful in the future. This book will explain various behavioral and mathematical models of bad decision phenomenon related to micro- and macro-economic phenomenon. Numerous models have been proposed to explain the psychological processes related to such phenomenon. This book will also introduce some new models that are useful to explain human bad decisions. It ends with some speculation about the future of modern economic psychology while referring to their relation with fields related to neuroscience, such as neuroeconomics, that have been developed in recent years.