An investigation into the application of decision analysis in United Kingdom companies

In recent years decision analysis has been heralded as an approach with a real contribution to make in business decision making. While development of such techniques as decision trees and risk analysis has received considerable attention in management science journals, published descriptions of actual applications have been hard to find. This paper presents the results of a survey, carried out in the summer of 1971, with the objective of finding to what extent decision analysis has been applied in practice by management of U.K. companies. The findings show that a number of successful studies have been undertaken, mainly in the fields of capital investment and marketing, but that practical problems encountered in using decision analysis, particularly in the assessment of subjective probabilities and measurement of attitudes to risk, are severely restricting potential areas of application.