A Systematic Review of Decision-making Theories used in Decision Support Systems Research

Decision Support Systems (DSS) are tools designed to assist individuals or organizations with their judgment and decision making (JDM) tasks. Despite abundance of prior reviews about theoretical evolution of the DSS field, we do not have a clear understanding of the competing JDM theories used during design or evaluation of DSS tools. In this paper we focus on DSS support for individual JDM as it requires different design principles than those for organizational JDM. To enhance our understanding, we reviewed DSS literature and identified JDM theories discussed in 51 research papers selected through a systematic review of 2241 articles. Using grounded theory approach, we identified three categories of competing JDM theories: task optimization-utilization, task interpretation-explanation, and trust-building. Our findings suggest that incorporation of these competing theories allow for more explanation of a JDM phenomenon to be achieved given their combined theoretical foundations. Finally, we provide examples on how to incorporate competing JDM theories.