Decision under uncertainty: from the normative approach to the Negotiation Analysis

In the literature on decision making, a dichotomy is usually made between the normative approach-which focuses on logically consistent decision procedures and the descriptive approach, which focuses on people’s actual decisions. These two approaches are usually assigned to two different disciplines, namely economics/mathematics for the normative approach and psychology for the descriptive approach. This dichotomy has been complemented by Raiffa and other authors by introducing the prescriptive approach to help people make good decisions. In this paper, we briefly introduce the normative and descriptive approaches and then show how the prescriptive approach links them. Finally, we discuss how the prescriptive approach overcomes some limitations of game theory when considering interactive decision problems