The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regulates the workplace to reduce hazards to employees. Employers often challenge its decisions. Debate draws attention to many pressing issues in decision theory. To cover regulatory decisions made by government agencies for the public, decision theory must expand and reorganize. It needs an account of a group's probability and utility assignments. It also needs an account of decision making for others given uncertainty.

My project is the formulation of rules for rational decision making – that is, the construction of a normative decision theory. I seek rules powerful enough to handle the complexities of decisions made for another person or group of persons. In the cases targeted, a professional or group of professionals has some expert information and wants to use it to serve a client's goals. I expand and improve decision theory so that it offers practical guidance in these decision problems.

I assume that a rational decision maker deciding for herself adopts an option of maximum utility and then argue for various ways of calculating an option's utility. Decision theory gains range and depth by analyzing utility according to a multidimensional method that Section 1.1 explains and later chapters elaborate. Briefly, multidimensional utility analysis unifies methods of analyzing utility.