Mathematics of Decision Making

Did you have to choose one decision out of several decisions ?. Through out our life, we make decisions. We need to find a spouse and have to choose one of the n potential candidates. We need to hire a programmer in the team, and we need to interview m people and find one candidate. Did you explore a career opporutnity recently ?. You have to choose one job, after interviewing m companies and make a stopping decision Do you see the pattern ?. I was researching around to see, if there is any optimal number of decision, we should be looking around before finalizing on one decision. I stumbled around the secretary problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem which suggests that optimal cutoff for further exploration is n/e and we are guaranteed to make the best decision with a probability of 1/e. It is very interesting to see how the random processes can actually help us in guiding us when to stop looking for more options and narrowing down on one.