This paper builds upon earlier work from the decision/risk analysis area in presenting simple, easy-to-use approximations for the mean and variance of PERT activity times. These approximations offer significant advantages over the PERT formulas currently being taught and used, as well as over...

Bidding for offshore U.S. oil and gas leases is a major corporate resource allocation problem involving enormous uncertainties and very high stakes. This paper presents two new, operationally useful decision analysis models to aid in bidding for oil and gas leases. They are unique in that they...

Three-point discrete-distribution approximations are often used in decision and risk analyses to represent probability distributions for continuous random variables---e.g., as probability nodes in decision or probability trees. Performance evaluations of such approximations have generally been...

This paper compares a number of approximations used to estimate means and variances of continuous random variables and/or to serve as substitutes for the probability distributions of such variables, with particular emphasis on three-point approximations. Numerical results from estimating means...