Johannes Siebert

Tag: decision analysis

  • Fifty years of decision analysis in operational research: A review

    Fifty years of decision analysis in operational research: A review

    We review the development of research in Decision Analysis (DA) over the past fifty years. After presenting the axiomatic foundations and discussing the DA process, we start with value-focused thinking as a problem structuring method. We then analyze the model building phase, with a focus on graphical models for decision-making under uncertainty: belief networks, decision trees, and influence diagrams. Next, we analyze how DA research has dealt with uncertainty focusing on the areas of elicitation, aggregation, and evaluation. We then discuss sensitivity analysis, describing local and global techniques, from one-way sensitivity analysis to the value of information. Finally, we review the literature on information acquisition and discuss the role of information value in this context

    Borgonovo, Emanuele; José, Victor, R. R, Shachter, Ross; Siebert, Johannes U; Ulu, Canan. “Fifty Years of Decision Analysis in Operational Research: A Review” (Invited Review on occasion of the celebration of the 50th Anniversary of EURO (the European association of Operational Research Societies), European Journal of Operational Research) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2025.05.023

  • Deciding for a Secure Tomorrow: Proactive Decision-Making and Retirement Financial Planning Behavior

    Deciding for a Secure Tomorrow: Proactive Decision-Making and Retirement Financial Planning Behavior

    Retirement financial planning behavior (RFPB) encompasses the concrete actions individuals take to prepare financially for retirement. We examine RFPB from an Operational Research (OR) perspective using Decision Analysis (DA) principles—decision quality and value-focused thinking—operationalized via proactive decision-making (PDM), which integrates DA-grounded proactive cognitive skills (PCS) with proactive personality traits derived from the organizational behavior literature. Using cross-sectional survey data from 457 UK adults and structural equation modelling with systematic model comparisons and multigroup tests, we assess whether PDM influences RFPB through four psychological traits—propensity to plan, confidence in financial information search, willingness to accept investment risk, and general self-efficacy—and whether relationships differ by financial literacy and numeracy. Results show that PDM affects RFPB entirely through these psychological traits (full mediation), with PCS—the trainable, DA-grounded decision-analytic skills—serving as the operative mechanism, while proactive personality traits are non-significant in this pathway. The mediated model explains 57.1% of RFPB variance and outperforms partial-mediation, traits-only, and reverse-causality alternatives. Multigroup analyses indicate that the indirect structure holds across financial literacy and numeracy groups, with patterns suggesting a compensatory role of PCS under lower financial literacy. Together, the evidence links DA-grounded decision-analytic skills to RFPB. Our findings highlight the potential of PCS-focused decision-analytic competence training as an OR-relevant mechanism to promote RFPB, complementing financial literacy and numeracy programs. Additionally, our study complements optimization-focused OR approaches to retirement financial planning by identifying PCS as a decision-analytic lever that strengthens RFPB—the behavioural precondition for adopting such optimized prescriptions in practice.

    Siebert, Jana; Siebert Johannes U., Blösl, Florian; “Deciding for a Secure Tomorrow – Examining Proactive Decision-Making and Retirement Planning Behavior”, European Journal of Operational Research) (in press), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2025.10.021