Three Essays on Decision Making under Uncertainty: Insights from Humanitarian Organizations and Disaster Environments

In a wide range of applied domains, organizations and their staff make consequential decisions with important ethical implications under time pressure and uncertainty. Decisions made in humanitarian organizations exemplify these conditions. In a bid to improve their decision making, humanitarians have sought to maximize their use of objective data and analytics and to avoid being biased. Heuristics, however, have proven to be effective decision making strategies in a range of real-world environments, despite relying on little information. This thesis asks how the science of fast-and-frugal heuristics can inform decision making in humanitarian and disaster environments. The first essay reports experiments that show how analysts’ preferences for data formats and attributes are shaped by values, highlighting the importance of understanding organizational goals in the environment. The second essay asks whether a proverb, “Misfortunes never come singly”, which embeds deeply engrained socio-cultural wisdom and learning about the environment, can be computationally modelled and serve to inform ecologically rational heuristics for disaster anticipation and other social settings. The third essay identifies simple heuristics that perform as well as more complex decision strategies favored by humanitarian organizations and lays out a process model for applying the science of heuristics to management problems.