Research Opportunities in the Decision and Management Sciences

The National Science Foundation established the Decision and Management Sciences Program (DMS) in 1982. Healthy and growing, DMS is likely to affect OR/MS significantly, not only by providing funds for basic research, but also through its vision of a combined theoretical and empirical science of operational and managerial processes, and by its policy of bringing together different disciplines within the program. An NSF workshop held in Dallas in April 1984 sought to identify research opportunities in the decision and management sciences. Promising areas, many of them inviting cross-disciplinary research, appear in the development of measurement-based models for operational processes (both natural and designed and including organizational and managerial activities), choice theory (individual and group choice, values, judgment, and risk behavior), decision support, and the treatment of complexity. Increased knowledge in any of these areas would be likely to have a valuable long-run impact on management practice.