What can managers learn from professional poker players about decision-making?

This paper aims to investigate how past decision-making experiences can improve future decisionmaking. Nine semi-structured interviews were conducted with profitable professional Poker players. The results point out that it is the knowledge background of the decision-maker that makes him make sense of the situations he experiences. The research findings allowed the identification of three mechanisms that facilitate and make future decisions faster and more appropriate based on past experiences: (1) memory, (2) reflection, and (3) tools and analytical approach. The research contributes by showing evidence that, when supported by analytical tools, decision-makers can improve the quality and speed of the decision-making process. For organizations and supply chains, the paper highlights the importance of recognizing patterns based on the past to make sense of the future. For operations management, in events like COVID-19, companies can take advantage of memory to enact over unprecedented scenarios, prevent disruptions, and recover. © 2023 IGI Global. All rights reserved.

Rapid development of analytical methods for evaluating pandemic vaccines: a COVID-19 perspective.

Vaccines are key in charting a path out of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, development of new vaccines is highly dependent on availability of analytical methods for their design and evaluation. This paper highlights the challenges presented in having to rapidly develop vaccine analytical tools during an ongoing pandemic, including the need to address progressive virus mutation and adaptation which can render initial assays unreliable or redundant. It also discusses the potential of new computational modeling techniques to model and analyze key viral proteins and their attributes to assist vaccine production and assay design. It then reviews the current range of analytical tools available for COVID-19 vaccine application, ranging from in vitro assays for immunogen characterization to assays to measure vaccine responses in vivo. Finally, it provides a future perspective for COVID-19 vaccine analytical tools and attempts to predict how the field might evolve over the next 5-10 years.