Distributed Decision Making

Book excerpt: Distributed decision making (DDM) has become of increasing importance in quantitative decision analysis. In applications like supply chain management, service operations, or managerial accounting, DDM has led to a paradigm shift. The book provides a unified approach to such seemingly diverse fields as multi-level stochastic programming, hierarchical production planning, principal agent theory, negotiations or contract theory. Different settings like multi-level one-person decision problems, multi-person antagonistic planning, and leadership situations are covered. Numerous examples and real-life planning cases illustrate the concepts. The new edition has been considerably expanded by additional chapters on supply chain management, service operations and multi-agent systems.