INST 354 Lecture 11: INST354 Lecture 11: Picturing Decisions
10 Feb 2019
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
We will use schematic decision tree diagrams to describe decision situations throughout this book. One of the major uses of these diagrams is to summarize the essential structures of personal or public decision situations in order to apply the principles of scientific decision theory to choose the best course of action. We will introduce this applied decision analysis approach in chapter 11. But for the moment, we want to explain the method of constructing the diagrams so that we can use them to describe the tasks and situations that are important in research on decision-making behavior. For example, we might summarize a medical situation concerning a knee injury, as in figure 2. 1. In the medical example, we imagine two possible courses of action: have a knee operation or do not have the operation. On the far right-hand side of the diagram, we list the consequences that are associated with choice points and events in the decision tree.
