Decision Procedure Models and Empirical Research: The Japanese Experience

This paper considers a new typology of decision procedures, the “fixed-size procedure” and the “sequential procedure,” associated with the way of discovering new alternatives. We discuss simple decision process models of these decision procedures, and hypothesize that decision makers with the sequential procedure search the smaller number of alternatives than ones with the fixed-size procedure. Our empirical research on Japanese firms supports this hypothesis, and we report the findings; when faced with greater uncertainty, the fixed-size procedure firms take organizing modes to increase information-processing capacity, and the sequential procedure firms take ones to decrease the need for information; the fixed-size procedure firms take “Japanese” conflict resolution modes but the sequential procedure firms do not. Thus, we provide a new point of view for the study on decision processes and Japanese management methods.