Postponement Theory

Postponement is a decision to postpone a decision. Postponement occurs when one party seeks to either gain additional information and/or to delay the decision in search of better terms.

Postponement Theory is an economic strategy that maximizes possible benefits and minimizes risks by delaying a decision in order to gain additional data or analytic insights. That is, the decision maker believes that the benefits of delaying the decision while more data is acquired outweigh the cost of potentially making a suboptimal decision.

Data Ramifications: Postponement theory plays out when organizations decide to postpone a decision in order to gather more data and build more accurate analytics to improve the probability of making a "better" decision.

DEAN OF BIG DATA TIP:

Postponement theory is heavily influenced by the costs associated with Type I Errors (False Positive) and Type II Errors (False Negative) associated with that decision...