The ideas in this chapter grow out of a simple view of what the function of decision-analytic tools is: to help a decision maker with a set of problems. (This chapter uses the label “decision maker” to refer either to an individual or to a coherent group.)

The thrust of this view is easier to understand if we add a list of other things that could have been said. Decision-analytic tools are not intended primarily for any of the following purposes:

1. Capturing intuitive preferences.

2. Modeling future preferences.

3. Modeling environmental processes.

4. Embodying axiomatic or methodological rigor, or conforming to axiomatic structures.

Decision analysts often defend and try to implement these four goals, for the excellent reason that attainment of each of them often helps. But they derive their merit from the primary goal of helping decision makers with problems, not the other way around.

Unfortunately, each of these subgoals can lead to results that hinder, rather than facilitate, attainment of the main goal. Capturing intuitive preferences in detail can lead to complicated, hard-to-understand, hard-to-communicate elicitation methods and models. Often the decision-analytic procedures form future preferences, or even help invent options about which to have preferences, rather than modeling preferences. Modeling of environmental processes is very useful for many technological problems, but its appearance of objectivity can create or nurture myths.