Prof. George Wu
Chicago GSB

Topic : Managerial Decision Making

George Wu is Professor of Managerial and Organisational Behavior at the University of Chicago, Graduate School of Business. Prior to joining the faculty in 1997, Prof. Wu spent six years at Harvard Business School as an Assistant and Associate Professor in the Managerial Economics area and then the Negotiation & Decision Making Group, and then one year as a lecturer in Decision Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School.

At University of Chicago, Wu teaches Managerial Decision Making, Strategies and Processes of Negotiation in the campus and executive MBA programs. He also is a director and instructor in University of Chicago's executive education program on Negotiation and Decision Making.Professor Wu has consulted and taught extensively in corporate programs. His clients have included Accenture, Bank Auditing Institute, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Boston Consulting Group, Chicago Tribune, Dade Behring, DTE Energy, General Electric, Lafarge, Monsanto, Motorola, and Searle.

His research interests include decision analysis, the psychology of individual, managerial, and organisational decision making, and cognitive biases in bargaining and negotiation. He has published his research widely in a number of professional journals, including Cognitive Psychology, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Management Science, Marketing Letters, Medical Decision Making, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and Theory and Decision. Professor Wu is a Department Editor of Management Science, an Advisory Editor of Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, and is on the Editorial Board of Decision Analysis and Theory and Decision.

Session Plans:

Session 1: Introduction to Decision: Elements of Effective Decision Making

• Why is decision making hard?
• What is a good decision?
• Elements of a good decision making process
• The ABCs of decision making

Session 2: Case Discussion

• Application of Session 1 to John Brown case

Session 3: Decision Traps

• The pitfalls of overconfident judgments
• Heuristics and biases in judgment under uncertainty
• Remedies for eliminating biases