Decisionmaking models of the real world and expertise For many years, the study of decisionmaking was a small field of endeavour in the social sciences and psychology. For all the new-found significance attributed to the work by Herbert

For many years, the study of decisionmaking was a small field of endeavour in the social sciences and psychology. For all the new-found significance attributed to the work by Herbert Simon (1978; 1986) (Nobel laureate in economics) and his colleagues, those genuinely concerned with understanding the full scope and nature of human decisionmaking were consigned to the margins of disciplinary respectability. And yet, over the past decade, there has been remarkable growth in research about decisionmaking from a wide variety of social science perspectives. Characteristically, this research is driven by a commitment to understand better empirically how and why people make the decisions they do. This research is remarkably open-minded about the scope and nature of decisionmaking; here we are less concerned about theoretical propriety and fitting within accepted social science and psychological theories than we are concerned to take seriously observed behavioural traits and patterns of individual and collective action. Before looking at recent research on decisionmaking, we should pause for a moment and consider why decisionmaking was so marginal to the social sciences. In economics and finance, the answer is surely obvious: the theoretical building blocks of the nascent science relied upon an ordered and tractable analytical logic that enabled the generalisation and summing up of individual behaviour across the economy and society. Textbooks are still dominated by this analytical imperative: at base, the rational utility-maximising model holds sway over the vast territory of the discipline affecting the study of all kinds of economic activity including labour productivity, industrial organisation, and marriage and divorce. In finance, especially academic studies of financial markets, the rational utility-maximising model has dominated proceedings, driving out dissenting views until very recently; see Andrë Shleifer's (1999) Clarendon Lectures at Oxford on market inefficiency.