Guest lecture: Making Decisions Under Uncertainty in Absence of Data

Guest lecture: Making Decisions Under Uncertainty in Absence of Data

The Department of HRM & IB organized a guest lecture on “Making Decisions Under Uncertainty in Absence of Data”, on 14th Aug, 2014 in the AV hall. Decision making is certainly the most important task of a manager and it is often a very difficult one. The difficulty in decision making increases when making decisions under uncertainty in absence of data. To throw some light on this subject, speaker on the occasion was Professor Saurabh bansal.Professor Bansal is an Assistant Professor at the Pennsylvania State University, USA. His research focuses on how business managers perceive and estimate uncertainties, how they react to these uncertainties, and how they should react to the uncertainties. He teaches courses on business modeling and analytics, and was the recipient of the Paiste Teaching Award at Smeal College of Business in 2012. In 2007 he was nominated for the Fred Moore Teaching Award at The University of Texas at Austin.To begin with, Professor Bansal was extended a floral welcome by Dr Rakhi Gupta, Rector and Registrar, the IIS University. He was then invited to give his talk. His lecture was divided in three parts. First, he discussed a generic framework for decision making under uncertainty in operations context. Then, he discussed some existing and new results to make these decisions when no data exists to determine the probability distributions for the uncertainties. Finally, he discussed a business context in which the results have been used in practice. This lecture was very informative and provided great learning to all students of the department.