Distributed decision-making – a unified approach

The paper gives an overview over the broad area of distributed decision making (DDM). In achieving a systematic procedure a general framework is developed that allows to describe the numerous approaches in DDM in a unified way. Focusing on application areas the paper is not only considering various fields in the management sciences, like hierarchical production planning, supply chain management, or managerial accounting, but is regarding other disciplines as well. Particularly, economics and computer sciences are investigated as to their specific contributions to DDM. It turns out that each field and discipline elaborate different aspects of DDM which particularly for OR could be used to solve concrete highly involved DDM problems.