Wikis > Decision-Making Tools
Decision making involves the selection of a course of action from a range of policy options including that of maintaining status quo. Decision-making is sometimes incorrectly considered to be synonymous with the entire policymaking process rather than being a stage in the process. It is also distinguishable from other stages in features of specific tasks and the limited number of key players involved (Xun et al, 2010). Depending on the task and context, policy practitioners deploy a variety of strategies to solve decision problems. Often these strategies are heuristic that may overlook information pertinent to the policy problem, leading to decision errors. Payne discusses that strategy selection can sometimes be seen as a tradeoff between making the most accurate decision versus the level of ‘cognitive effort’ spent. One commonly used tool is Decision-matrix.