Decisionmaking organizations with acyclical information structures

An analytical model of a team of well-trained human decisionmakers executing a well-defined decisionmaking task is presented. Each team member is described by a two-stage model consisting of a situation assessment and a response selection stage. An information theoretic framework is used in which bounded rationality is modeled as a constraint on the total rate of internal processing by each decisionmaker. Optimizing and satisficing strategies are derived and their properties analyzed in terms of organizational performance and individual workload. The results are applied to the analysis and evaluation of two three-person organizational designs.