Decision analysis, the practice of Bernoullian decision theory and Bayesian statistics, is reviewed in relation to its application in management. Aspects of the scaling of beliefs (probabilities) and preferences (utilities) are discussed, focussing on practical problems. It is concluded that the...

A wide variety of methods have been suggested for ex ante project appraisal. The most logical and complete of these appears to be multiattribute utility theory (MAUT) which provides a formal procedure for handling the difficulties of ex ante evaluation arising from multiple objectives,...

Game theory - aptly described as the scientific approach to poker, business, women and war - has proved to be no cure-all for the conflict situations studied by agricultural economists. Like Marshall, it has had its day. Still, just as in general economics, game theory has provided an...

The concept of stochastic dominance is described and its use is illustrated in relation to the evaluation of the output of a systems simulation model of lucerne haymaking in south-west Spain. Two alternative machinery systems are ranked for various lucerne areas using the criteria of stochastic...

Evaluating the risk of a particular decision depends on the risk aversion of the decision maker related to the underlying utility function. The objective of this paper is to use stochastic efficiency with respect to a function (SERF) to compare the ranking of risky alternatives using alternative...

Often analysts must conduct risk analysis based on a small number of observations. This paper describes and illustrates the use of a kernel density estimation procedure to smooth out irregularities in such a sparse data set for simulating univariate and multivariate probability distributions.