Critique of: “The Role of the Subconscious in Executive Decision-Making”

Robert Ferber's paper revives a debate almost forgotten in our preoccupation with rational methods for seeking maximum benefits or minimum costs. Normative decision theory helps us to know how to seek optimal solutions, but there is also a need to know how far our daily decisions depart from this ideal. Except for a few studies in experimental heuristics little has been reported in the field of descriptive decision analysis showing how businessmen make everyday decisions. Consequently Ferber's welcome case vignettes reopen the question of how we might proceed in developing more adequate descriptive models of the decision process.