Theses and Dissertations from UMD

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Subject: search.filters.subject.decision making

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Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Design and Comparison Of Sample Allocation Schemes For Multi-Attribute Decision Making
    (2018) Mehta, Kunal; Herrmann, Jeffrey; Systems Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In case of multi-attribute decisions, when a decision maker has a limited budget for data collection, then the decision maker has to decide on the number of samples to observe from each alternative and its attributes. This allocation decision is of importance when the observation process is uncertain, such as with physical measurements. This thesis presents a sequential allocation approach in which measurements are conducted one at a time. Prior to making a measurement the decision-maker’s current knowledge of the attribute values is used to identify the attribute and alternative pair to sample next using all these allocation procedures. The thesis discusses a simulations study that was performed to compare the Sequential Allocation Approach, Proportional Allocation Approach and Uniform Allocation Approach. We evaluated the frequency of selecting the true best alternative when the attribute value observations contain discrete random measurement error. The results indicate that the sequential approach is significantly better than the other approaches when the budget is small; as the budget increases, its advantage decreases.
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    SEA LEVEL RISE AND ITS ECONOMIC EFFECTS ON NAVAL INSTALLATIONS
    (2015) Schedel, Angela Luzier; Baecher, Gregory B; Civil Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Global sea level is rising. Coastal lands are at risk from eventual inundation, property loss and economic devaluation. The threat is impending but not rapidly approaching. With sea level rise projections ranging from 0.1 meters to 2 meters by the year 2100, there are concerns but little action being taken to adapt and prepare. Given the potential economic impact of future flood events, it appears that many government agencies and municipalities are not taking enough action to prevent the threat of sea level rise. Due to its large footprint of real estate within the coastal zone worldwide, one of the largest organizations threatened directly by sea level rise is the U.S. Navy. Adapting to sea level rise will require strategic planning and policy changes in order to prevent the encroaching sea from limiting naval operations and threatening national security. This study provides a tool to aid Navy decision makers in Implementing Sea Level Adaptation (ISLA). The ISLA tool applies the methodology of decision trees and Expected Monetary Value (EMV), using probability to estimate the cost of potential flood damage and compare this cost to adaptation measures. The goal of this research is for ISLA to empower decision makers to evaluate various adaptation investments related to sea level rise. A case study is used to illustrate the practical application of ISLA. The case study focuses on when to implement a variety of adaptation measures to one asset at the naval base at Norfolk, Virginia. However, its method can be applied to any asset in any location. It is not limited to only military bases. ISLA incorporates a unique method for analyzing the implementation of adaptation measures to combat future coastal flooding which will be worsened by sea level rise. It is unique in its use of decision tree theory to combine the probability of future flood events with the estimated cost of flood damage. This economic valuation using Expected Monetary Value allows for comparison of a variety of adaptation measures over time. The projections of future flood damage costs linked to adaptation allows the decision maker to determine which adaptation measures are economically advantageous to implement and when to implement them.
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    Health Care Management System for Diabetes Mellitus: A Model-based Systems Engineering Framework
    (2015) Katsipis, Iakovos; Baras, John S.; Systems Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The present thesis develops a framework for Health Care Management Systems using modern Model-Based Systems Engineering methodologies and applies it to Diabetes Mellitus. The desired architecture of such systems is described. Tests and interventions, including Health Care IT, used for Diabetes 2 diagnosis and treatment, are described and modeled. A Controlled Markov Chain model for the progression of Diabetes Mellitus with three states, three diagnostic tests, ten interventions, three patient types, is developed. Evaluation metrics for healthcare quality and associated costs are developed. Using these metrics and disease models, two methods for tradeoff analysis between healthcare quality and costs are developed and analyzed. One is an exhaustive Monte Carlo simulation and the other utilizes multi-criteria optimization with full state information. The latter obtains similar results as the former at a fraction of the time. Practical examples illustrate the powerful capabilities of the framework. Future research directions and extensions are described.
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    Crowdsourcing decision support: frugal human computation for efficient decision input acquisition
    (2014) Quinn, Alexander James; Bederson, Benjamin B; Computer Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    When faced with data-intensive decision problems, individuals, businesses, and governmental decision-makers must balance trade-offs between optimality and the high cost of conducting a thorough decision process. The unprecedented availability of information online has created opportunities to make well-informed, near-optimal decisions more efficiently. A key challenge that remains is the difficulty of efficiently gathering the requisite details in a form suitable for making the decision. Human computation and social media have opened new avenues for gathering relevant information or opinions in support of a decision-making process. It is now possible to coordinate paid web workers from online labor markets such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and others in a distributed search party for the needed information. However, the strategies that individuals employ when confronted with too much information--satisficing, information foraging, etc.--are more difficult to apply with a large, distributed group. Consequently, current distributed approaches are inherently wasteful of human time and effort. This dissertation offers a method for coordinating workers to efficiently enter the inputs for spreadsheet decision models. As a basis for developing and understanding the idea, I developed AskSheet, a system that uses decision models represented as spreadsheets. The user provides a spreadsheet model of a decision, the formulas of which are analyzed to calculate the value of information for each of the decision inputs. With that, it is able to prioritize the inputs and make the decision input acquisition process more frugal. In doing so, it trades machine capacity for analyzing the model for a reduction in the cost and burden to the humans providing the needed information.
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    POKES, PRODS, AND PUSHES: INFORMATION AVAILABILITY AND DECISION MAKING IN AMBIGUOUS ENVIRONMENTS
    (2013) Greenwood, Brad N.; Agarwal, Ritu; Gopal, Anand; Business and Management: Decision & Information Technologies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In this dissertation I investigate how changes in the availability of information influences decision making in inherently ambiguous environments. As the Internet has not only fostered connectivity, but also catalyzed information generation on an unprecedented scale, my objective is to revisit the concept of information availability and salience in the digital age. I conduct my empirical analysis in the contexts of entrepreneurship and healthcare, which are significant both theoretically as well as in terms of economic and public welfare. In essay one, I examine how rising perceptions of fashion, viz., increased media coverage and herding, influence the willingness of venture capitalists to fund non-co-located entrepreneurs. This essay contributes to extant theory on entrepreneur-VC co-location by identifying the effect that social trends, as opposed to factors which are native only to the focal entrepreneur, can have on the willingness to venture capitalists to fund non-co-located entrepreneurs. In essay two, I explore the interplay between the broadcast and social media, as well as the ability of these media to incentivize firm formation on the part of nascent entrepreneurs. Applying the lens of agenda setting theory I demonstrate that the social media will moderate the impact of the broadcast media when entrepreneurs and financiers seek to found and fund new ventures. This study augments existing literature by considering not only the intensity of non-novel information, but also how participation will impact decision making. The third essay investigates a persistent puzzle in the medical literature: how different physicians react to medical guideline release (i.e. the release of new and novel information) which call into question the efficacy of long standing treatment options. Situating this essay within two theoretical tensions in the literature, the trade-off between agility and routines and the debate between costless and costly information assimilation, I find that while physicians are discerning in their reaction to new information their reactions are not quick, creating significant public welfare deficits. Moreover, I find that physician characteristics, such as tenure, board certification, and freelancer status, significantly moderate physician response to new guidelines. Taken together these essays contribute to the literature on Information Systems and Strategic Management by augmenting understanding of the construct of information availability, and how it affects decision makers in ambiguous environments.
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    A Portrait of School District Crisis Management: Leadership Choices in Montgomery County during the Sniper Shootings of October 2002
    (2010) Porter, Brian Joseph; Mawhinney, Hanne B.; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The actions of two assailants who shot and killed 10 people and wounded three others, including a student, in the region around Washington, D.C., in October 2002, provides the backdrop for a qualitative study of the emergency response by school district leaders in Montgomery County, Maryland. The study explores and describes the experiences of the district's superintendent and a group of leadership staff, including the author as a participant researcher, and two elected officials and a union president who contributed to the decisions and actions. A non-evaluative study, based on portraiture in the form of case study, the narrative report provides often minute-to-minute detail of the events of the case and a unique perspective of crisis management and decision making at the school district level. The study revealed aspects of the case regarding implementation of an emergency response plan, involvement of principals, management style, political extremes, and phases of the crisis. The study also illuminated targeted objectives for decision and actions, including a central focus on mental health and communications. The study reflects a subject area that is largely overlooked in the research of education leadership. Implications from the study are that school district leaders need specific training and experience necessary to manage a crisis, make decisions under crisis circumstances, and improve their performance through practice. The study identifies licensure for school district leaders as a way to attain a standardized level of competency in crisis management and decision making skills. The study also provides an entry point for further research in educational crisis management and decision making. In particular, the study explores a unique blend of research encompassing critical tasks in public leadership during a crisis, complex transformational processes among the components of a school district's social system, and expectations of high reliability in organizational environments that support mindfulness and expertise.
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    THE EFFECTS OF ORDER AND DIFFERENTIATING INFORMATION IN DECISION MAKING
    (2005-05-03) Rivadeneira Cortez, Anna Walkyria; Norman, Kent L; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    A condition under which both primacy and recency effects occur is demonstrated. Primacy and recency are observed in decisions among alternatives that do not have differentiating information. Decision makers, however, need to base their decisions on differentiating information; individuals search for information that may assist them in discriminating options. Only under the absence of such information order effects influence decisions.