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U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Value assessment aid to complex decision making. Final report

Technical Report ·
OSTI ID:5110186

Value assessment (VA) is a new decision aid that can improve the performance of decisionmakers confronted with multiple attributes and conflicting objectives. Managers who are not supported by formal decision aids turn to various ''satisficing'' or effort-reducing biases that can lead to serious errors in the decisionmaking process. Value assessment, on the other hand, is an optimizing approach to problem-solving behavior. VA helps decisionmakers overcome the tendency to turn to effort-reducing biases by reducing the complexity of making tradeoffs and weighing all available information. Many of the issues which confront modern electric utility managements are complex, multiple attribute problems which must be viewed from engineering, financial and socio-political perspectives simultaneously. Added to this are the complications contributed by factors like uncertainty, risk, incomplete information and conflicting objectives among the public it serves. This is the complex decisionmaking arena which VA is intended to support.

Research Organization:
Southwest Research Inst., San Antonio, TX (USA)
OSTI ID:
5110186
Report Number(s):
EPRI-NP-2507; ON: DE82905815
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English