Decisionmaking organizations with acyclical information structures

An analytical model of a team of well-trained human decisionmakers executing a well-defined decisionmaking task is presented. Each team member is described by a two-stage model consisting of a situation assessment (SA) and a response selection (RS) stage. An information theoretic framework is used, in which bounded rationality is modeled as a constraint on the total rate of internal processing by each decisionmaker. Optimizing and satisficing strategies are derived and their properties analyzed in terms of organizational performance and individual workload. The results are applied to the analysis of two three-person organizational designs.