Decision Synthesis makes up and lives up to its title. The authors have done an exemplary job of piecing together the diverse strands of the emerging, multidisciplinary field of behaviorally oriented decision theory in a way that serves their stated goal – improving decision-making by synthesizing techniques and perspectives with a sensitivity to the peculiarities of individual decision problems and decision-makers. The text draws upon diverse literatures whose creators generally know about one anothers' existence, but never have quite found the time to work out the interrelationships between their respective approaches. Although there are too many of these pairwise relationships for many to be fleshed out in any great detail, seminal ideas can be found at many junctures. As such, it is a book that gives some of the future of decision-making, as well as well-chosen pieces of its past and present.

In creating this synthesis, Watson and Buede have adopted a decidedly disorderly approach to the often tidy world of decision theory. They present rudiments of the important normative axiomatizations of formal prescriptive approaches. However, they also caution the reader against taking it all too literally. Following much current thinking, they thoughtfully discuss the limits to imputing descriptive validity to normative theories – that is, assuming that people make decisions the way they are supposed to.