Primer on Decision Making: How Decisions Happen by James G. March

Author:James G. March
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 1994-05-22T14:00:00+00:00

All these additions to the basic model are plausible. Each has some basis in observations of real decision processes. Unfortunately, as the model becomes increasingly realistic, it becomes more difficult to use empirically. In particular, using empirical data to estimate the various factors becomes impossible. The amount of data required is several orders of magnitude greater than the amount of data imaginable.

The result is that force models and metaphors are very general, but they do not lend themselves to empirical confirmation or disconfirmation. Power can be conceived as a force that weights wishes to determine an outcome, but such a conception is not particularly useful unless there are independent ways of estimating power.

THE ROLE OF WISHES IN INDIVIDUAL POWER

Despite those empirical difficulties, force models of power are useful in suggesting a source of power that might easily be overlooked. A conspicuous feature of such models is that power comes from the relation between one’s own wishes and the wishes of others. There are advantages to having preferences and identities that are consistent with those of powerful people. This advantage is sometimes decried as a complication in measuring power (distinguishing the chameleon from the “genuinely” powerful), but it is a real phenomenon also. If decision makers want what other people want, they are more likely to get what they want.

More generally, considerable advantage comes from having wishes that lie close to the “center of gravity” of the rest of the system. Conversely, individuals who have wishes that lie far from the “center of gravity” will experience persistent powerlessness. Interestingly enough, from the perspective of theories of democracy, such powerlessness will not be particularly reduced by giving citizens who are thus disadvantaged more control over resources or access to decisions.

Consider, for example, how perceptions of power (and thus power) are influenced by the distribution of preferences or identities as translated into wishes. Suppose the power of an individual is the power he or she is perceived by others to have. Suppose further that each actor estimates the power of each other actor by observing individual wishes and resulting outcomes and inferring individual power indices (by assuming that those who get what they want have more power). Although it might be imagined that initial reputations for power would be augmented by the processes of reputation formation, under fairly general conditions a different result is produced. If perceived power determines actual outcomes, a process of updating perceptions by observing outcomes actually converges to a stable distribution of perceived power that depends not at all on the initial distribution of perceived power but only on the distribution of wishes.

These features of force models are of some significance in thinking about ways of equalizing power in a social system. They suggest, for example, that strategies for reducing disparities in power probably should include not only redistribution of resources but also redistribution of personal preferences and identities. That result has implications for democratic governance. It indicates that a theory of democratic governance that emphasizes the role of

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