在你做出重大決策前 必須考慮的 12 個問題

經濟學家常常假設人是理性的決策者，但是，心理學家對人類做實驗發現並非如此，作者之一的 Daniel Kahneman 便是因為此開創性的研究得到諾貝爾獎 (註 1)。本文章說明每個人都會有偏誤 (bias)，而且無法避免。透過三個實際的案例 (是否改變售價、收購某公司、或擴充產能)，作者提出 3 大類共 12 個問題 (註 2)，避免他人的偏誤以改善決策，也可以增進決策樹的決策品質。

Preliminary Questions: Ask yourself  

1. Is there any reason to suspect motivated errors, or errors driven by the self-interest of the recommending team?
2. Have the people making the recommendation fallen in love with it?
3. Were there dissenting opinions within the recommending team?  

Questions that decision makers should ask the team making recommendations 

4. Could the diagnosis of the situation be overly influenced by salient analogies?
5. Have credible alternatives been considered?
6. If you had to make this decision again in a year, what information would you want, and can you get more of it now?
7. Do you know where the numbers came from? (註 3)
8. Can you see a halo effect?
9. Are the people making the recommendation overly attached to past decisions? 

Questions focused on evaluating the proposal 

10. Is the base case overly optimistic?
11. Is the worst case bad enough?
12. Is the recommending team overly cautious?

(註 1) 共同作者 Amos Tversky 當時已過世，所以沒有得獎。
(註 2) Daniel Kahneman, Dan Lovallo, and Olivier Sibony, Before You Make That Big Decision, Harvard Business Review, June 2011, Vol. 89, Issue 6, pages 50-60.
(註 3) 王柔雅，賠錢部門養七年　女業務變中國車燈王，商業周刊 1523 期，2017/1/23 (當年主管估算投資兩千萬元，到現階段超過十億元)。話說回來，如果知道多年來需投入十億元，該公司可能不會從事 LED 車燈的研發。