In my opinion, this book is an excellent synthesis of the state of the art in judgement and decision making (for short: JDM) research. It shows what has been achieved so far and it indicates key topics of future research. I won't attempt to review the entire book (see e. g. Nickerson in: Journal of Mathematical Psychology, Vol. 48, 2004, p. 199-210), but I will try to give an idea of why this book can be a valuable source for people not belonging to the community of JDM researchers.
JDM research has been a very active field for decades, leading to a bulk of publications. The present book seems to be singular, because the authors of the different articles do not only summarise the work they have done so far, but they also try to reveal very basic concepts and limitations of their various research programs. This kind of information tends to get lost in everyday research and publications related to it, but such inforamtion is indispensible for a precise and comprehensive overview and for evaluating what has been achieved so far. Just to give an example: Human JDM capabilities can be seen as a powerful resource for coping with particular tasks or it can be considered to be a source of biases and pitfalls, which impede people's mastering of such tasks. Most reaerchers can be assigned to one of these two curreents. What is still missing is a comprehensive model which reveals which factors and factor combinations determine whether a decision is "good" or "bad", "biased" or "rational". Such models should not only apply to the artificial tasks used in laboratory studies preferred by many JDM researchers, they should also help understand people's coping with real-life JDM tasks. The authors of the different articles succeed in indicating their particular point of view and research interets and they succeed in showing strehgths and weaknesses of their approaches in relation to the work of their colleagues. A concluding chapter by Doherty provides an additional, very systematic, and very concise outline of the different research paradigms, of their relationships and of the topics which so far have either been neglected of not been treated in much detail. The prersent book is therefore very illuminating with respect to the basic orientations, current state and main desiderates of JDM research.
