Network History

The community grew from a research project on applying game theory to UK policy problems.

The work demonstrated that there was an appetite to apply game theory tools to the strategic analysis of decision-making processes in energy and resources policy design. This led to a series of workshops hosted by Imperial College London in 2015 and 2016, sponsored by industry with attendees from across industry, policy, and academia. The workshops highlighted a number of opportunities and issues:

  • There is an appetite for better networking amongst policy makers, industry, and academics.
  • Decision-makers and analysts are struggling to understand best practice and the developments taking place.
  • Capacity to understand which decision support tools are most appropriate for solving different problems is limited.
  • There is a proliferation of ideas and methods developed by analysts for decision support, but the community is fragmented.
  • There is little understanding of decision-making methods amongst decision-makers.
  • There is an enormous gap in understanding across different disciplines developing different processes, and a limited comprehension of integration of process from an end-to-end perspective.
  • There is a substantial desire to share best practice between disciplines.
  • There is a need for capacity to be developed across disciplines and sectors.
  • There is a need to better characterise what decision-makers want.

The workshops led to the creation of a small team from Imperial College London, Warwick University, London School of Economics, University of Strathclyde, and Lancaster University in partnership with the Defence Science Technical Laboratory, ATKINS, Anglian Water, and E3G, to develop a network to organise activities around the problems of decision-makers.

The Network has the express aim to provide a more holistic understanding of the relevant problem in terms of:

  • What they want to inform their decisions.
  • The institutional architectures within which decisions are made.
  • The circumstances and incentives decision-makers have to make their decisions.
AU4DM believes that taking a holistic view of the processes around decision‑making will improve the decisions at each point within an overarching decision-‘system.’