The Concept of Influence and Its Use in Structuring Complex Decision Problems

Abstract

Decision analysis combines the decision maker's uncertainty about problem variables, his structure relating the decisions and outcomes, and his preferences over outcomes to obtain a logically consistent decision. Structuring of the decision problem is part of the foundation of decision analysis. The primary function of the decision analyst is to capture the relationships among the many variables in a decision problem, a process called structuring. The purpose of this research is to improve the decision analysis structuring methodology. There must be a decision analysis theoretical foundation for the methodology, so that the resulting structure conduces to a solution of the decision problem. At the same time, it is required that the methodology be useful for communicating the relationships in a complex decision problem. The author discusses these two requirements and reviews previous research related to each. Keywords: Mathematical models; Matrices(Mathematics); Quadratic functions; Approximation(Mathematics); Discretization.