Decision Analysis: A Personal Account of How It Got Started and Evolved

Then these analytically motivated abstractions were gradually made more intricate as the body of mathematical techniques grew. The trend went from elementary analysis of complex, ill-structured problems to advanced analysis of well-structured problems. In OR departments, mathematical elegance displaced the old quest for making empirically based contributions to messy real problems. A sign of maturity, I suppose. In the early days of OR, descriptions of complex realities used probabilities and one did not worry too much if these were judgmentally based, but as the field "matured," probabilities were increasingly confined to the objective domain and interpreted as long-run frequencies. There was no hint of how best to elicit subjective, judgmental information from experts about uncertainties or in identifying and structuring multiple conflicting objectives. I suspect that my continuing interest in prescriptive decision analysis had its roots firmly planted in that first academi...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: IOR
• Authors: Howard Raiffa
• Keywords: IOR 2002, Multiple Conflicting Objectives, Problems, Theory