Knowledge Strategies and Decision Making

This is a textbook addressed mainly to the students of the Faculty of the Business Administration, Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest. It can also be used successfully by any student in Business, Economics, Management and Marketing, since it presents the fundamental concepts and ideas concerning knowledge management and decision making using analytic hierarchy processes. Also, it can be used by anybody working in one of these fields who are willing to improve her/his level of knowledge and understanding.
Knowledge management emerged in the last decade as an integral part of the strategic management in order to take advantage of intangibles in creating a competitive advantage. Strategic knowledge and knowledge strategies become basic concepts in the new managerial decision making process.

This textbook is a hands-on approach on decision making using analytic hierarchy processes when intangible factors in knowledge strategies need to be numerically assessed jointly with tangible ones. Analytic hierarchy processes form a privileged domain in the decision making field by incorporating psychological aspects of comparative choices and being able to successfully cope with human subjectivity. Through splitting a decision problem into several smaller ones and building logical hierarchy using criterions and alternatives, tangible and intangible contributing factors can be jointly assessed and consistent priority vectors can be deduced.
Thus, the process of decision making in knowledge strategies can be precisely finalized with the most concrete numerical results. The last chapter illustrates several case studies from the Romanian business environment developed by the authors.           
 

Constantin Bratianu
Adriana Agapie
Ivona Orzea
Simona Agoston