A broad range of concepts which have been developed to both describe and prescribe the process of decision making, where a choice is made from a finite set of possible alternatives. Normative decision theory describes how decisions should be made in order to accommodate a set of axioms believed to be desirable; descriptive decision theory deals with how people actually make decisions; and prescriptive decision theory formulates how decisions should be made in realistic settings. Thus, this field of study involves people from various disciplines: behavioral and social scientists and psychologists who generally attempt to discover elaborate descriptive models of the decision process of real humans in real settings; mathematicians and economists who are concerned with the axiomatic or normative theory of decisions; and engineers and managers who may be concerned with sophisticated prescriptive decision-making procedures.