Attention Allocation and Managerial Decision Making

Abstract

One of the major problems of managerial behavior is the setting of priorities.Time is a scarce resource and managers have to find ways to deal with the multiple tasksthat face them. This paper addresses the issue of priority-setting among tasks bymanagers by proposing analogies from job-shop scheduling theory. We develop a modelthat views managers employing a combination of rationality and affective judgments with alimited processing capacity.