Verbal Decision Analysis for Unstructured Problems

This book is devoted to a special class of decision making problems, called 'unstructured problems'. The peculiarity of these problems is connected with the essentially qualitative description of the involved factors and the subjective character of relations between these factors. The work describes the world of human decisions and methods of action that improve the chances of making sensible decisions in a complicated, contradictory and incompletely definite environment. A new procedure of decision making in non-structured problems is constructed and some methods that are logical inferences from it are demonstrated. The studies proceed from the contradiction between the normative methods of decision making, which prescribes the decision maker how to make the best decisions and the descriptive results showing how in real life people act when making a decision. The authors propose an approach that integrates modelling procedures with elicitation methods.