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 tasks that face them. This paper addresses the issue of priority-setting among tasks by managers by proposing analogies from job-shop scheduling theory. We develop a model that views managers employing a combination of rationality and affective judgments with a limited processing capacity.