Decision Making in Business Simulation Design

To develop effective business simulation exercises it is critical that developers and users understand the human decision-making process so that simulations achieve the desired learning objectives. Understanding how to present the situation and define the environment is central to creating a learning exercise where decision makers can improve their decision-making performance. It is an important pedagogical issue to know whether the business simulation is being designed to reinforce and build a decision maker’s ability to respond in a normative reasoned fashion to a decision problem, or to experience the situation in its complexity and respond in a synthetic intuitive fashion. To comprehend the implications of these two viewpoints the debate between promoters of the normative view on decision making and the descriptive view on decision making are presented. A critical analysis of these different perspectives is shown to influence how decision making should be taught, how simulations should be designed, and how learning outcomes should be measured