Master's Thesis from the year 2013 in the subject Psychology -
Miscellaneous, grade: 1.7, Technical University of Munich (Lehrstuhl für
Technische Dienstleistungen und Operations Management), course:
Technische Dienstleistungen und Operations Management, language:
English, abstract: Till now operations management mainly dealt with
finding appropriate models to facilitate decision making processes, but
these theoretical concepts did not always help to deal with actual
processes in practice. Thus the understanding of human behaviour becomes
more and more important. Furthermore the behavioural aspect of the
decision making process plays a big role, as everyone of us would face
resource allocation situations or portfolio decisions and people always
do not make optimal decisions as mathematical models would do, but
rather a completely another way often based on heuristics. Therefore it
is interesting to investigate how people tackle such decision making
situations intuitively and which cognitive strategies they follow
thereby. This work aims to give a detailed overview about the relating
literatures at first. Then decision making processes in portfolio
decision situations are experimentally investigated regarding to
behavioural aspects, in this case concerning knapsack problems, with the
application of the methodology verbal protocol analysis. Concrete
heuristics which subjects were following during the decision process
could be identified and classified under the terms of certain criterions
for further analysis. Hereby verbal protocol analysis helped to collect
good and applicable data for determining specific behaviour of people in
portfolio decision processes.
