Patrick Humphreys Department of Social Psychology London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE. Email: P. Humphreys@lse. ac. uk This book presents a selection of contributions to the conference on Implementing Systems for Supporting Management Decisions: Concepts, Methods, and Experiences held in London in July, 1996. The conference was organized by the International Federation of Infonnation Processing's Working Group 8. 3 on Decision Support Systems and the London School of Economics and Political Science. (LSE). The Programme Committee for the Conference comprised Liam Bannon, University of Limerick; Patrick Humphreys, LSE, co-chairperson; Andrew McCosh, University of Edinburgh; Piero Migliarese, Politecnico di Milano, co- chairperson; Jean-Charles Pomerol, LAFORIA, Universite Paris VI. The chairperson of the organizing committee was Dina Berkeley, LSE. The programme committee members served also as the editors of this book. Each contribution was selected by the editors after peer review and was developed by its authors specifically for inclusion in this volume. Working group 8.
3 was formally established in 1981 on the recommendation ofIFIP's Technical Committee on Information Systems (TC8). The scope of the working group covers: "Development of approaches for applying information systems technology to increase the effectiveness of decision makers in situations where the computer system can support and enhance human judgment in the perfonnance of tasks that have elements that cannot be specified in advance.