TELLUSANT, INC.

Commercial Decision Difficulty

This document is a verbatim rendering of the previous discussion in Markdown.

This is an excellent question.

I would actually be cautious with the statement as written.

“Commercial decisions have become dramatically more difficult.”

It is intuitively true, but I don’t think it has been “proven” in the scientific sense because “decision difficulty” is not a single measurable variable. Rather, there is overwhelming evidence that many of the drivers of decision difficulty have increased. Those drivers can be measured individually.

In fact, I think this is stronger than simply making the assertion.

A better formulation

Instead of saying

Commercial decisions have become dramatically more difficult.

say something like

Commercial decisions are being made in environments that are substantially more complex, uncertain, and interconnected than a generation ago.

That statement is much easier to defend.

What has actually increased?

I would decompose commercial decision difficulty into several dimensions.

Dimension Evidence Trend ————————— ————————- —————– Number of decision Product proliferation, ↑ variables channels, prices,
regulations

Interdependence Global supply chains, ↑↑ ecosystems

Speed of change Technology cycles, ↑↑ competitors

Uncertainty Geopolitics, inflation, ↑↑ climate, AI

Information volume Massive data availability ↑↑

Decision frequency Near real-time operations ↑

Stakeholders Regulators, investors, ↑ NGOs, consumers

Consequences of mistakes Viral social media, ↑ market transparency
———————————————————————–

Every one of these can be documented independently.

Herbert Simon predicted this

One of the earliest thinkers was Herbert Simon.

His argument was not that humans became worse decision makers.

His argument was

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

In other words,

more information ≠ better decisions.

Instead, attention becomes the scarce resource.

That observation has only become more true since the internet and AI.

Information overload

This is one of the best-established findings.

Numerous experiments show that after a certain point, additional information reduces decision quality rather than improving it. Researchers distinguish between the amount of information and the diversity of information; increases in either can overwhelm decision makers and degrade performance.

So modern executives face

without necessarily making better decisions.

Computational complexity

This is a fascinating newer perspective.

Peter Bossaerts and Carsten Murawski argue that decisions themselves possess computational complexity.

Some decisions are literally harder because the number of possible combinations grows explosively.

Their argument is essentially

Rationality assumes people can compute the optimal answer.

Reality:

Many business decisions are computationally intractable.

The difficulty is not merely psychological but mathematical.

I suspect you would appreciate this perspective because it aligns well with optimization, forecasting, and model specification.

Complexity of alternatives

Decision science has repeatedly shown that increasing

causes people to switch from optimal evaluation toward heuristics and elimination strategies.

This maps directly onto modern pricing, portfolio management, forecasting, and capital allocation.

Environmental turbulence

Strategy researchers have long discussed

Compared with 1985, today’s executive simultaneously faces

None of these existed together.

The environment has objectively become more dynamic.

A framework I like

If I were writing the Tellusant narrative, I’d define commercial decision difficulty as

D=f(C,U,S,T,R)

where

Then explain each.

Complexity itself can be decomposed into

This becomes a rigorous framework rather than a rhetorical statement.

What I think is missing from the literature

Most research examines human cognition:

But your work is fundamentally different.

Tellusant is trying to reduce decision complexity in the commercial system itself.

For example:

Instead of saying

“Executives need better judgment.”

Tellusant effectively says

“Executives face a decision space that has become too large to navigate unaided. Our models compress that complexity into a tractable representation while preserving the economically relevant structure.”

That is a much stronger and more defensible claim. It also aligns naturally with PoluSim, TelluBase, and your broader emphasis on improving decision quality rather than merely providing more data.

In fact, I would avoid claiming that decision-making has become harder and instead claim that the dimensionality of commercial decision problems has expanded dramatically. “Dimensionality” is a concept that economists, statisticians, operations researchers, and AI practitioners all understand, and it has a far more precise meaning than “difficulty.” I think that wording is both more rigorous and more consistent with Tellusant’s scientific positioning.