MARKET SURVEY
Improving Decision
Making Based On
Market Survey Data
By Charles Makau
D
ecision making is the process of
selecting one course of action
from various alternatives. The
decision maker strives to choose the best
alternative under the given circumstances.
This applies to individuals, a group or
even a company, while the decision itself
may be based on various information
points and factors.
Decision making happens in different
environments, mostly based on available
information about occurrence of events.
It can be rare to have decision making
under certainty, often, decision makers
are under risk; where there is more than
one state of nature and knowledge about
the likelihood of each state of nature
occurring, as well as the corresponding
outcomes being unknown (D Kahneman
& Tversky, 1979).
In some situations, some prior information
or assumptions are available, sometimes
they are used for prior analysis. A basic
need of market or social research is to
improve or revise these prior probabilities,
as a way of providing new knowledge and
information on the target market so as to
make the right choices.
To undertake a market research, it is
important to ask whether the survey cost
is greater or less than the value of the
additional information obtained. To make
such a decision, one needs pre prosperous
analysis to compare the cost of the
market or social research and the value of
additional information. If, and only if, the
value of additional information exceeds
the total survey cost, then the research is
justified. After the market survey has been
undertaken, the decision maker will then
use the revised probabilities as a basis for
selecting the best strategy.
Expected Monetary Value (EMV ) is
the additive financial benefits of a given
course of action, therefore where a market
survey is undertaken, the decision maker
should be able to maximize the EMV
and minimize expected opportunity loss
There exists various ways of improv-
ing value of information to the decision
maker, one of these is use of data inte-
gration and visualization as a way of in-
corporating additional information into
the primary research so as to improve
its value, and at the same time reduce
cognitive biases in decision making.
36 MAL34/20 ISSUE
(EOL).
Improving Expected
Monetary Value
There exists various ways of improving
value of information to the decision maker,
one of these is use of data integration and
visualization as a way of incorporating
additional information into the primary
research so as to improve its value, and at
the same time reduce cognitive biases in
decision making.
Recent advances in the
industry on improving EMV
The market/social research industry has
seen a significant transformation in the
recent past. A decade ago, most data
collection involved basic data collection,
tallying and reporting. These evolved to
capturing data on spread sheets, and with
the need to improve accuracy, techniques
such as double entry were incorporated.
Other data collection methods included
Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
scanning, or the use of customized
software. Currently, mobile data collection,
online, sensor data and even automated
data collection systems are the norm.
Basically, in the past decade, the quality
of execution was a major variable in
improving the quality and value of research
data; technology seems to have sorted this
out to a large extent. With geo locations
and real time data delivery, quality control
can be managed better and more easily.