DECISION-MAKING UNDER UNCERTAINTY: A HEURISTICS OVERVIEW AND THE ANALYTIC NETWORK PROCESS

The paper provides an overview of known heuristic techniques and different views on decision-making based on heuristics. We discuss heuristics of the "heuristics and biases" program introduced by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, and heuristics of the "fast and frugal heuristics" program developed by Gerd Gigerenzer and colleagues. We propose the idea that heuristics, being a natural instrument of human assessment, may be applied not only for the simplification of the decision process, but also in deliberate strategies without sufficiently reducing the complexity of a problem. In light of this, we give an overview of the Analytic Network Process methodology as a cognitive process. The Analytic Network Process is a descriptive psychophysical process developed by the mathematician, a distinguished University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, Thomas L. Saaty in the 1980s, and it is used for large-scale, multi-criteria decision analysis. It represents the decision problem as a network structure with dependences and feedbacks between included criteria and alternatives. Whether applying heuristics may help to answer questions like "which of the two elements influence more", pairwise comparisons of considered elements give more accurate answers on "how strong is this influence". The aim of this article is to draw the attention of psychologists to the interdisciplinary research of the Analytic Network Process that has only been previously studied as a mathematical algorithm, and not as a cognitive process.