Simulation as an aid to build a management expert system

Managers have to make management decisions many times a day. These concern matters such as price setting, development and marketing of new products, expanding or reducing the sales force, increasing or decreasing research activities, etc. This kind of decisions is mainly based on numerical data (turnover, market share and many financial ratios), but the manager's knowledge and experience also plays an important role. In this paper an attempt is made to capture this kind of knowledge in the field of industrial marketing and to use it in an expert system. To assess the quality of such an expert system it has participated in a management game competing against a number of MBA students.