Give Yourself a Nudge Helping Smart People Make Smarter Personal and Business Decisions

The best way to improve your quality of life is through the decisions you make. This book teaches several fundamental decision-making skills, provides numerous applications and examples, and ultimately nudges you toward smarter decisions. These nudges frame more desirable decisions for you to face by identifying the objectives for your decisions and generating superior alternatives to those initially considered. All of the nudges are based on psychology and behavioral economics research and are accessible to all readers. The new concept of a decision opportunity is introduced, which involves creating a decision that you desire to face. Solving a decision opportunity improves your life, whereas resolving a decision problem only restores the quality of your life to that before the decision problem occurred. We all can improve our decision-making and reap the better quality of life that results. This book shows you how.

1. Nudge yourself to make better decisions; 2. Your decisions and your life; 3. Making value-focused decisions; 4. Defining your decision; 5. Identifying your values; 6. Creating alternatives; 7. Identifying decision opportunities; 8. Obtaining authorization to select alternatives controlled by others; 9. Becoming a value-focused decision-maker; 10. Enhancing the quality of your life; 11. Useful perspectives on decision-making; Appendix. Evaluating alternatives and making a decision.

Ralph L. Keeney is Professor Emeritus at the Fuqua School of Business of Duke University, USA. Throughout his career, he has been a professor and consultant on making important decisions for policy makers, businesses, and individuals. He received his Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, and the author or co-author of several books, including Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions (with John S. Hammond and Howard Raiffa, 2015), Value-Focused Thinking: A Path to Creative Decision Making (1992), and Decisions with Multiple Objectives (with Howard Raiffa, Cambridge, 1993).