Belmont CA: Duxbury Press (1996),
The past five years have seen changes in decision analysis, and I have tried to capture the most important advancements in this second edition of Making Hard Decisions. The greatest change is the inclusion of material from Ralph Keeney s Value-Focused Thinking (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). Keeney stresses the primacy of the decision maker's values in the decision-making process. Values provide the very motivation for decision-making in the first place. Although it sounds trite and oversimplified, "When in doubt, think about what your values are!" is very good advice for anyone who faces a difficult decision or who has the vague uneasy feeling that things could be better.
Because values play a vital role in so many aspects of decision-making, incorporating value-focused thinking required rethinking many parts of the book. The most radical restructuring is in the first section. Readers will find important new sections in Chapter 3 on structuring objectives, modeling multiple objectives using decision trees and influence diagrams, and developing measurement scales. A simple example demonstrating how objectives can be modeled with an additive value function is included in Chapter 4. An important element of value-focused thinking is that it can provide guidance in the creation of new alternatives, and this material is incorporated in Chapter 6. Finally, the incorporation of value-focused thinking early in the book had implications for the presentation of multiattribute utility in Chapters 15 and 16.
In addition to the incorporation of value-focused thinking, references to software have been updated throughout the book. Although software changes so rapidly that the material in the book may be dated by the time it appears in print, I have included up- to-date material on a few of the most useful decision-analysis programs available for personal computers: DPL for both influence diagrams and decision trees, DATA for decision trees, Logical Decisions for modeling multiple objectives, BestFit for using data, @RISK and Crystal Ball for Monte Carlo simulation.
The important changes and new features in the second edition of Making Hard Decisions are:
Use the buttons below to access sections of the hyper-preface.
Introduction | New in the Second Edition | Guidelines for Students
Computers and Decision Analysis | A Word to Instructors
Keeping Up with Changes | Acknowledgements