Decision Modeling in Policy Management

The effectiveness of policy decisions depends not only on the quality of the analysis but also on the communication between analyst and decision-maker. As a result, this text employs the following three-step decomposition of the decision modelling process throughout: (1) visual-structural modelling, (2) analytic-formal modelling, and (3) algorithmic resolution modelling. The 10 chapters address the most relevant issues in decision modelling in policy management: the problem-solving process; visual decision modeling; descriptive and normative preference elicitation; and aggregation methods, dealing with uncertainty in dynamic problems, social choices, conflict resolution, and constraint-optimization problems.Notable features of this text include: introduction of a visual approach to decision modelling in policy management (over 100 figures and illustrations), integrating the European School (outranking relations, dimension reduction, ordinal preferences, rank correlation) and the American School (utility theory, analytic hierarchy process, game theory, constraint-optimization); it presents analytic approaches in the context of structural, formal, and resolution modeling; references to further practical and theoretical readings; intuitive visual reasoning; detailed numerical examples replacing theorems and formal proofs; it discusses new decision analytical features: visual interactive preference ordering; dynamic plots in virtual negotiation; hypermedia influence diagram modelling; and it integrates 100 problems with worked-out solutions; an Internet syllabus with assignments, students comments, and Internet multimedia software are available.