Experiences with MAUD: Aiding decision structuring versus bootstrapping the decision maker

Abstract

This paper is about how or what a decision aid can aid, based on our experiences with a particular interactive computer based decision aid called MAUD (MultiAttribute Utility Decomposition), designed to help decision makers in the structuring, decomposition and recomposition of preferences between multiattributed alternatives. MAUD is of use in situations where the decision maker has some intuitions about relevant aspects of a decision problem but where the precise nature of its subjective work structure is quite uncertain a priori. Here we examine 40 MAUD sessions with people involved in 4 decision making groups in the arts and mass media. The use of convergent validation procedures between predicted and obtained preference orderings for choice alternatives is shown to be a fallacious index of the degree to which aiding was accomplished, and alternative procedures are developed indicating that where MAUD was able to aid people it did so through the reduction of goal confusion, and through consciousness raising about the structure of value-wise importances of attributes possessed by choice alternatives, rather than about the representation of those alternatives on those attribute dimensions. We conclude that where MAUD was able to help it did so by making a person more capable of deciding in general, rather than merely solving the immediate decision problem.