Decision Making of Professionals
Year: 2017

Psychology of decision making is such an intriguing topic to study, because it permeates all areas of human life from very personal decisions about one's life, as whom to marry or what job to pursue, to decisions in professional area, which can impact much larger number of people. In our monothematic issue we focused on the latter kind of decision making. We focused on research of decision making in specific work settings, especially those in which quality of decision making is crucial for quality of work itself, and in which wrong decisions can lead to severe economic and human damage. For example in the area of health, American Institute of Medicine estimated the rate of unnecessary deaths caused by wrong decisions at around 100 000 per year. In area of financial investment, statistics from DALBAR also show a big and unfortunate trend, even among professional investors, to buy high and sell low (which is opposite to the normative maxim of good investment) It is noteworthy that large proportion of these wrong decisions is not caused by work related factors, such as lack of skill, information or education, but by psychological factors of the professional decision maker. Thus, psychological research of decision making of professionals is very important and it is our hope that it can contribute to prevention of unnecessary, wrong decisions. The goal of this monothematic issue was to showcase studies that reflect these ideas and to study the process in decision making in different types of professionals.This monothematic issue features six articles dealing with professionals from roughly three main domains: managerial and finance, health care and teaching. They cover wide range of issues, from decisions related to individual differences in rational decision making to decision processes in various situations and choice of communication strategies.The first paper, Self regulation Capacity and Decision Making of Slovak Managers in Routine Situations and in Situations with Possible Negative Outcomes by Peter Halama examined managers, specifically, how their self regulation to adaptive vs. maladaptive decision making depends on the situation context, i.e. whether the decision situation is routine or whether it can have serious negative consequences. Well self regulated managers were able to avoid maladaptive decision making more frequently than their less self regulated peers. However, even though managers with low self regulation do not apply adaptive decision making in situations without possible negative consequences, it was shown that they are able to use more adaptive decision strategies when the negative consequences of improper decision become possible.Next paper deals with financial professionals and compares them with non professionals (or professionals in related fields) Matus Grezo, in the paper titled We Expect Stocks to Rise, but We Do not Know When and Which Ones: Excessive Optimism in Predicting Future Stock Indices Returns, examines excessive optimism in predicting future stocks by financial professionals, specifically in the field of investment, financial advisors and lay people. He confirms the existence of excessive optimism in all three samples with 93.24 optimistic predictions (in comparison with real situation in stock market) and summarizes that although the investors were the most precise in their predictions among the three groups, lay people outperformed financial advisors, who were much more overconfident in their predictions than they ought to have been.Financial professionals and non professionals are also compared in the next paper: Financial Planning for Retirement in Young Adults: Interaction of Professional Experience, Knowledge, and Beliefs by Viera Bacova, Karatina Dudekova, Lenka Kostovicova and Vladimir Balaz. They measured subjective and objective financial literacy and financial retirement literacy together with personal beliefs in financial planning for retirement (FPR) and actual saving behavior.