This chapter describes a study conducted at the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, in their School of Business. The study was to explore the applicability of a judgment-analytic decision support system to the assessment of the likelihood of an applicant being selected for admission to the School's Graduate Certificate in Business Administration (GCBA) program. The likelihood of a program administrator selecting a particular applicant is directly linked to the assessment of the likelihood of that applicant's success in the GCBA program. The purpose of this study, in effect, was to analyze the administrative judgment process in assessment of an applicant's likelihood of success in the program. THE PROCESS OF HUMAN JUDGMENT Human judgment is a process through which an individual uses social infonnation to make decisions. The social infonnation is obtained from an individual's environment and is interpreted through the individual's cognitive image of the environment. The. cognitive image provides a representation of the environment based on past experiences and training, and essentially predisposes the person to respond to social infonnation in predictable ways. An individual's policies or beliefs about the environment represent these patterns. Human judgments are based then upon one's interpretation of available infonnation. They are probability statements about one's environment and how one reacts to it. This condition leads to the human judgment process being inherently limited. It is fundamentally a covert process. It is seldom possible for an individual to accurately describe his or her judgment process accurately.

Inhalt

1. Management Information Systems.- Empirical assessment of information technology chargeback systems decisions.- Lessons learnt from the successful adoption of an ERP: The central role of trust.- Simultaneous analysis of heterogenous databases on the web: The ADDSIA project.- 2. Education Innovations & Distance Learning.- Decision support for the management of admissions to academic programs.- The use of tacit knowledge in selection decisions in universities.- 3. International Business.- Role of political violence in foreign direct investment decisions.- On the stability of countries' national technological systems.- 4. Marketing.- Marketing of differentiated fresh produce.- A decision support system for the seller's return problem in the product line design.- 5. Finance and Banking.- Portfolio performance measures: A brief survey and hypothesis testing.- A system dynamics model of stock price movements.- Information effects on the accuracy of neural network financial forecasting.- Is the Taiwan stock market efficient?.- The dynamics of implied volatility surfaces.- Application of nonstationary Markovian models to risk management in automobile leasing.- 6. Optimization & Decision Making.- Decision making Under Various Types of Uncertainty.- Decision aid in the optimization of the interval objective function.- A fuzzy extension of a mixed integer MOLP model for solving the power generation expansion problem.- Management science for marine petroleum logistics.- 7. Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis, Aid & Practice.- Dealing with missing data in rough set analysis of multi-attribute and multi-criteria decision problems.- Cardinal value measurement with MACBETH.- Inferring a multicriteria preference model for rural development projects evaluation.- An adaptable frameworkfor educational software evaluation.- Assessing country risk using a multigroup discrimination method: A comparative analysis.- 8. Decision Support Systems and Information Technology.- RODOS: Decision support for nuclear emergencies.- DSS for the evaluation of national IT infrastructure investments: A study of cable television in Greece.- Global IT outsourcing decisions: Contract structure, negotiations, and global deal teams.- Using Internet multimedia database information systems for decision support in conservation planning.- An interactive workload and risk balancing model and decision support system for probationer assignment.- 9. Health Care Planning & Hospital Operations.- A goal programming scheme to determine the budget assignment among the hospitals of a sanitary system.- A simulation model to evaluate the interaction between acute, rehabilitation, long stay care and the community.- Author Index.