Human Engineering of Decision Aids

Abstract

Publisher Summary The purpose of a decision aid is to provide an analysis of a problem that is acceptable to the decision maker, and that makes recommendations for future action. The final recommendation must be consistent with all other information provided by the decision maker. Presumably the decision aid contains procedures for detecting inconsistencies, whether they occur among the initial judgments or between the final recommendations and the person's global evaluation of the options. The formal system of decision analysis concerns the specification of beliefs and values. Because decision theory itself provides the rationale for evaluating any behavior, self reference occurs whenever there are attempts to evaluate the statements of value. Invariance of recommendation under changes in context may be the safest guide to action. The value of a decision analysis lies in the insight that it provides into the decision maker's value system, rather than in specific recommendations for action. Several computer programs have recently appeared that can implement such a decision analysis. These programs make few assumptions about the nature of the person's problem, and include procedures for helping the person to describe any problem in terms that would be suitable for analysis. The overall goal of the system is to arrive at a choice that maximizes some explicit criterion, given certain assumptions about the nature of the problem. Achieving the objective of the decision system is clearly dependent on input of some sort from the human decision maker. There is discussion on communication between decision maker and decision aid—model selection, problem structuring, representation and translation, information retrieval, generating new ideas, and quantification.