ETHICAL ISSUES
IN FORECASTING AND DECISION ANALYSIS

Dunal M. McCurdy
MBA 615- Business Foundations
November 24, 2011

ETHICAL ISSUES
IN FORECASTING AND DECISION ANALYSIS

It is especially important to think about the most critical causes of the problem in making your forecasts and decisions.
The process of forecasting involves using observations about the problem situation to predict the outcomes of your own actions, the actions of others, and the outcomes of other situational factors at play.
Forecasting is especially critical in making decisions about problems with ethical implications because these types of problems often have significant consequences for the decision-maker, and other people, including the
As a Christian, Proverb 19:20 instructs us to “Get all of the advice and instruction you can so you will be wise all the rest of your life.”
The identification of the critical causes of the problem is a significant element in effective forecasting and ethical decision-making, and people are not naturally good at identifying critical causes. Since we, as humans, are not naturally adapt in making such decisions, it is always best to trust in the Lord and to ask for His guidance so that we may know the right way to go. This is a direct correlation with Proverbs 16:33, “We may throw the dice, but the Lord determines how they fall”. Strategic decisions, resource allocations, and careers may hinge on the way things are predicted rather than the way they actually turn out. The forecaster is often placed in the uncomfortable position of being the one who bears bad news or who contradicts the official positions of others in the organization. Furthermore, as you are well aware by now, it is often possible to bias a forecast in one direction or another by unduly restricting the class of models or the set of explanatory variables which are investigated, by varying the length of the sample which is fitted, by deciding to include or suppress influential observations, by focusing on short-term trends rather than long-term trends or vice versa, and so on. (Tittle, 2000).
Ethical