This paper develops a method for interactive multiple objective linear programming assuming an unknown pseudo concave utility function satisfying certain general properties. The method is an extension of our earlier method published in this journal (Zionts, S., Wallenius, J. 1976. An interactive...

Utility functions are an important component of normative decision analysis, in that they characterize the nature of people's risk-taking attitudes. In this paper we examine various factors that make it difficult to speak of the utility function for a given person. Similarly we show that it is...

This article reports a procedure developed to assist the U.S. Department of Energy in selecting a portfolio of solar energy applications experiments. The procedure has also been used in other government procurements and appears to be applicable in a variety of project funding processes. The...

Project Appraisal Methodology (PAM) is a multidimensional, easy to use tool for assessing the relative merits of R&D projects. It requires users to estimate three vectors of economic and scoring values: energy benefits, consumer savings and societal factors. The Division of Fossil Fuel...

In this paper we analyze competitive decision-making situations in terms of their preference structures and posterior performance, through a Bayesian decision-theoretic framework. The setting is that of a two-by-two, two-person, non-zero-sum and noncooperative game which is repeated over time....

We consider a model of search when the distribution of prices (wages) is unknown. The effect of changing the objective function from minimizing expected cost to maximizing expected utility is examined.

An analysis is made of a preference order dynamic programming procedure proposed in the literature for stochastic assembly line balancing problems. It is shown that in general the procedure does not satisfy the monotonicity condition and that therefore there is no guarantee that the solutions...

This article demonstrates that: (1) When a normally distributed decision variable is combined with an analytic utility function (one with derivatives of all orders and a power series expansion involving those derivatives), the expected utility can be expressed in powers of \mu and \sigma ². (2)...

This paper presents a decision model for a serious medical problem: the diagnosis and treatment of undifferentiated liver disease with jaundice. The model formalizes the use of information before a treatment is chosen, taking account of prior information collected by the doctor from laboratory...

When several persons organized as a group are to choose one from among several specified alternatives they may make use of majority voting or some other decision-making process. This paper considers the case in which the decision process includes among the alternatives some that are probability...