Rational Choice and Judgment by Brown

p.xiii"Decisions permeate all human activity. We all make decisions, all the time, for ourselves or for the organizations we work for. Sometimes we get them wrong and regret the consequences; and sometimes we get them right but can't explain why. This is a textbook for courses to help students with such problems and generally to improve their professional or private decision making, supported by tools of personal decision analysis."

Goals, options and outcomes all play a major role in decision making.

p.38"A step beyond simply listing the pros and cons is for D [a person making a decision] to reason informally about the three essential decision elements noted in Chapter 1, goals, options, and outcomes"

Utility as simply defined as anything that you would want more of.

p.59"Utility, as used here, is any numerical measure of welfare, satisfaction, etc., such that [decision maker] D would prefer more [of that particular quantity, whatever it is] to less."

Interestingly, decision analysis does not directly help us to identify the options that are promising. We would need another technique to help us to identify candidates, and then the likely candidates.

p.66"Decision analysis contributes to only part of the decision . It does not directly address the critical task of identifying promising options."

A decision aid might help us to make a decision. Such a tool should have the following characteristics:

p.132"Requirements of a Useful Decision Aid: Tool Essentials [section title]

To help [decision maker] D manage his/her private and professional life more rationally, [the] decision aid needs to meet some essential requirements. The analytic strategy needs to assure that:

The aid addresses the right question, whose answer, if sound, will help [decision maker] D decide.
The aid makes use of all relevant knowledge available to [decision maker] D.
Modeling is logically sound.
The model input accurately represents the knowledge available.
Output is in a usable, understandable, and timely form for [decision maker] D.
The tool's cost is acceptable.

Unless all these requirements are met, the resulting 'decision aid' is likely to be more harmful than helpful to rational action."

We should find some way to focus our analytic efforts so that the time is well spent. Forming an influence sketch or an influence diagram is one approach we can take.

p.139"A choice model can be structured in many different ways, appropriate in different circumstances... Distinctions have to do with how useful the structure is for the decision at hand... Different structures can focus attention on different aspects of the choice. This focus permits analytic effort to be spent where it can do the most good. An excellent way to organize your thinking initially about what the key considerations are is with an influence sketch (shown in Appendix 8A).[footnote: An influence sketch is a simple, qualitative version of the influence diagram, which is a well-established computerized device, logically equivalent to a decision tree, that deals more compactly and clearly with a complex representation of the problem, with many features of option outcome distinguished (Schacter, 1986)] The influence sketch lays out the salient causal connections between option and utility in a way that permits you to select a few to model explicitly."

Here is more about how an influence sketch can help us make a decision. Perhaps we can find a way to use an influence sketch in the evaluation function of our computer chess program?

p.151"An influence sketch helps identify contributors and settings that may have a significant effect on the utility of options. The evaluation of options may involve considering numerous possibilities intervening between commitment to an option and its ultimate utility to the decider. An influence sketch represents these graphically. Essentially, influence sketches draw attention to critical developments, events, and subsequent choices which may influence evaluation of the target choice and the interconnection between them. In particular, they show what influences what, within the overall influence of target choice on objectives (see Figure 8A.1a).

More ambitious influence diagrams have been developed and used as computational frameworks to evaluate options, much as decision trees do, but more compactly (Oliver and Smith, 1990)."