Complexity and Action: Reflections on Decision Making and Cybernetics.

This paper highlights some theoretical and epistemological reflections about the relevance of action for managerial studies. These reflections show how the cybernetic paradigm of complexity management can be used for better decision making that unites knowledge and action in a comprising, dynamic, and evolving approach. Cybernetics can help to overcome the fear of decision making in the face of uncertainty in complex scenarios, and can be an effective tool for improving the viability and competitiveness of firms in the twenty-first century

MER Model of Integral Management: Culture as Enterprise’s Key Success Factor

Enterprise culture is judged by many acknowledged scientists and researchers now as a major determinant of any enterprise’s success. The present article shows the research cognitions on the impact of enterprise culture to the success of the enterprises observed.

Modelling and optimizing multiple attribute decisions by using fuzzy sets

The purpose of this paper is to present a coherent perspective of modeling and optimizing multiple attribute decisions by using fuzzy sets. In management practice we face most of the time the situation in which a problem have several possible solutions and each solution can be analyzed using multiple criteria models. In the same time, in real life decision making process there is a given level of uncertainty which makes difficult a clear cut analytical analysis. The object of this article is to build a model approach for making multiple criteria decision using fuzzy sets of objects. Elaborating multiple attribute decisions involves performing an assessment and selecting from a given and finite set of possible alternative courses of action in the presence of a given and finite, and usually conflicting set of attributes and criteria.decision making, fuzzy sets, modeling, multiple criteria optimization.

Quantum theory-inspired search

With the huge number and diversity of the users, the advertising products and services, the rapid growth of online multimedia resources, the context of information needs are even more broad and complex. Although research in search engine technology has led to various models over the past three decades, the investigation for effectively integrating the dimensions of context to deploy advanced search technology has been limited due to the lack of a unified modeling and evaluation framework. Quantum Theory (QT) has created new and unprecedented means for communicating and computing. Besides computer science, optics, electronics, physics, QT and search engine technology can be combined: interference in user interaction; entanglement in cognition; superposition in word meaning; non-classical probability in information ranking; complex vector spaces in multimedia search. This paper highlights our recent results on QT-inspired search engine technology

Warren McCulloch and the British cyberneticians

Warren McCulloch was a significant influence on a number of British cyberneticians, as some British pioneers in this area were on him. He interacted regularly with most of the main figures on the British cybernetics scene, forming close friendships and collaborations with several, as well as mentoring others. Many of these interactions stemmed from a 1949 visit to London during which he gave the opening talk at the inaugural meeting of the Ratio Club, a gathering of brilliant, mainly young, British scientists working in areas related to cybernetics. This paper traces some of these relationships and interaction

Quantum Experimental Data in Psychology and Economics

We prove a theorem which shows that a collection of experimental data of probabilistic weights related to decisions with respect to situations and their disjunction cannot be modeled within a classical probabilistic weight structure in case the experimental data contain the effect referred to as the 'disjunction effect' in psychology. We identify different experimental situations in psychology, more specifically in concept theory and in decision theory, and in economics (namely situations where Savage's Sure-Thing Principle is violated) where the disjunction effect appears and we point out the common nature of the effect. We analyze how our theorem constitutes a no-go theorem for classical probabilistic weight structures for common experimental data when the disjunction effect is affecting the values of these data. We put forward a simple geometric criterion that reveals the non classicality of the considered probabilistic weights and we illustrate our geometrical criterion by means of experimentally measured membership weights of items with respect to pairs of concepts and their disjunctions. The violation of the classical probabilistic weight structure is very analogous to the violation of the well-known Bell inequalities studied in quantum mechanics. The no-go theorem we prove in the present article with respect to the collection of experimental data we consider has a status analogous to the well known no-go theorems for hidden variable theories in quantum mechanics with respect to experimental data obtained in quantum laboratories. For this reason our analysis puts forward a strong argument in favor of the validity of using a quantum formalism for modeling the considered psychological experimental data as considered in this paper.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figure