178 7: Decision Th eory
priorities. Th e study of agendas in political science describes the changing pat-
terns both of the attention of the public and the attention of legislative bodies,
and strategies for infl uencing that attention (Kingdon 1995). In public adminis-
tration, the study of strategic planning and priority setting is a body of work that
assumes limited attention and the need to bring order to attention by structur-
ing agreements about which issues are most important (Bryson 1988; McGregor
1991). Systems of quality control and customer complaints in business manage-
ment are techniques for searching for the organizational problem most deserving
of attention. Th e logic of managing by exception and the logic of managing at
the boundaries of the organization are ways to describe the subjects or problems
most deserving of attention. Contemporary interests in reform, innovation, and
change work from the assumption that improving institutional order, continu-
ity, and predictability deserves less attention and that fi nding what to change de-
serves more attention.
Attention can be both failure and success driven. Rapid changes in air travel
security systems illustrate failure-driven shift s in attention away from customer
convenience and on-time service toward increased air travel safety. Th e failure to
stop airplane hijacking as a form of terrorism has replaced the war on drugs as the
focus of FBI attention. On the success side, the logic of benchmarking focuses de-
cisionmakers’ attention on the successes of other organizations in the same fi eld,
particularly prizewinners (the Baldridge Award, the Harvard Innovation Award,
etc.), and a process of mimicking so-called best practices. Th is attention to copying
the changes of others appears to have more to do with a rational search for legiti-
macy and acceptance than a rational search for productivity, because there is little
evidence of improved institutional performance (DiMaggio and Powell 1983).
Such limited attention capabilities are an important component to building a
new model of decision theory. Limits in attention, or what scholars have termed
“attention-driven choice,” can result in nonincremental policy change for an in-
stitution or political system (Jones and Baumgartner 2005a, 2005b). Policymakers
do not have the time or cognitive resources to evaluate incoming information in a
rational or “proportionate” way. Instead, unequal weight is given to certain pieces
of information, resulting in a biased updating of beliefs regarding a particular
policy (Jones and Baumgartner 2005a). Others have noted the extent to which
vivid images can increase the salience and reliance on certain, potentially non-
signifi cant, aspects of a problem (Sunstein 2013; Kahneman 2011). Th e result is a
decisionmaking process in which there may not be a logical connection between
means and ends.
Risk Taking
From a decision-theoretic perspective, risks and risk taking can explain varia-
tions from equilibrium. Th e estimation of organizational risk is infl uenced by
two simple features associated with equilibrium: fi rst, the past success of key