Doctoral Dissertation Research in DRMS: Cross-Disciplinary Analyses Using Multi-Attribute Utility Theory

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

The goal of this work is to study three particular types of decisions that involve more than one objective. The first set of decisions includes those with health outcomes. These can be either medical decisions, or decisions relating to lifestyle choices. These decisions often involve tradeoffs between length of life and overall well-being. The second set of decisions includes those with outcomes that are defined geographically. This is a typical feature of environmental policy decisions. These decisions involve evaluating one or more factors over many different regions, and are often too complex to be carried out practically without the help of decision analysis tools. The third set of decisions include those made in competitive game theory situations. Traditional game theory often considers only the physical or monetary outcome of these situations, but decision analysis is well-equipped to study the effects of other factors which may be important to the players. The common feature shared by these three decision types is that each one involves trying to maximize or minimize multiple objectives simultaneously. For these decisions to be feasibly analyzed, certain assumptions must be made about the structure of decision makers' preferences over the possible outcomes. The goal is to develop models simple enough to make the decisions tractable, but detailed enough to accurately reflect the preferences. In all three situations being studied, a better understanding of how these decisions should be made would be extremely beneficial.